Engineered quartz has given stone processors and the wholesalers that supply them twice the share of the kitchen worktop market that granite alone could have delivered. But we could already have reached peak quartz and the sector is greedy for new products that might increase its share of a market scythed down by the economic decline.

Life has not become any easier for the stone supply chain. Competition has increased but the market has not, which has hit margins for wholesalers and processors alike.

The toll on processors has been hard. According to some estimates, as many as a quarter of those supplying and fitting granite and engineered quartz kitchen worktops have gone bust since the crash really started to bite at the start of 2009 when banks withdrew their support for a lot of companies. Some of the people who had managed or worked for failed companies have started up again, leaving the debts of the previous companies with their suppliers – and it does not look as if the receivers’ work in the stone industry is over yet.

The expansion of sales on the back of the property boom up to 2008 can now clearly be seen as a bubble, so any expectations of a return to that level of activity in the short-term are unrealistic.

There are, though, anecdotal reports of an improvement in business now after fairly subdued demand during the long, cold winter, and news from the wider economy is also more encouraging than it has been for some time.

The Government has revised its figures so that instead of a 0.1% second dip into recession last year the market stayed flat, which has provided some positive headlines.

On the downside, the announcement was accompanied by the news that the fall in output in 2009 had been greater than previously thought at 7.2%, leaving the country’s income, measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), in the first quarter of this year still 3.9% below its pre-financial crisis peak, which it reached in the first quarter of 2008. Previously, GDP had been estimated to be only 2.6% below that peak in the first quarter of this year.

There has not been much good news for the construction industry since the crash and there has been little comfort from output figures this year, although new orders at the end of last year offered some hope for the future as they were 11.2% higher (£1.1billion more) in the final quarter than they had been in the corresponding period a year earlier.

They could have been more if there had not been such big cuts in infrastructure spending. Infrastructure budgets were halved again in the first quarter of this year, dragging construction orders overall down 13.9%.

But then June saw the Government announce a £100billion commitment to infrastructure spend, some of it before the next election in 2015.

It will not be spent on dimensional stone, but if the Government really does pump billions into the economy in the next two years, demand for just about everything will increase.

There is an indication that consumer confidence is returning in any case, with the household savings ratio at 4.2% in the first quarter, the lowest level it has been since the first quarter of 2009 (when it was 3.4%).

If the Government infrastructure stimulus comes on top of an already increasingly confident market, the biggest threat will be inflation, although just at the moment not too many people are going to be unduly concerned about that.

Certainly the strands of good news have been grabbed by the construction industry in general. The Federation of Master Builders (FMB) State of Trade Survey last month showed increases in confidence among small and medium-sized builders across most of Britain (Scotland is an exception). For the first time since 2007 in the second quarter of 2013 there were more FMB members expecting workloads, expected workloads and enquiries to get better than there were those expecting them to get worse.

Even in difficult times there are opportunities as well as threats and when growth has gone out of the market, those who are going to survive in it have to find ways to compete.

Inevitably margins have taken a hit for both wholesalers and processors and while cutting prices when sales volumes are falling compounds the problems, there are few alternatives when competitors are doing it.

As one traditional stone wholesaler who preferred not to be named told NSS: “I hate the bloody internet. So many people just go on there and look at the price, which doesn’t mean a damn thing. You can’t compete with all this cheap stuff coming in.”

Even engineered quartz, which the manufacturers had successfully branded in order to reduce the commoditisation of the material, is beginning to succumb to price pressures as ever more products are introduced.

One of the latest is Kalinga Stone Quartz, a product many people saw at the Natural Stone Show in ExCeL London this year on the stand of Nile Trading UK Co, which has opened a depot in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, and is servicing the whole of the UK with its own fleet of lorries.

Kalinga joins a wide range of natural granite and marble at Nile Trading that is sourced from around the world. The quality and service from the company is clearly proving popular as the company is one of the fastest growing wholesalers in the country. One of the contracts that has helped it on its way is the supply of Carrara marble to a customer who is refitting Pizza Express.

Most of the stone wholesalers sell quartz but they have also been looking for other materials to give them an advantage and a better margin and what they have found has been slab-size ceramics of one kind or another.

The Spanish company Cosentino, which makes the market leading Silestone quartz, the latest development in which is five new marble effects in a range called Nebula Code, is now also supplying an own-brand quartz to distributors.

Over the past several months it has also been gradually introducing the market to a new product called Dekton, which is made using a combination of the technologies of ceramics and float glassmaking.

Last month (June) it opened its first Dekton production line in part of a new 580,000m² expansion of its factory and distribution centre at its headquarters in Cantoria, Spain. The guests included the Spanish royal family and leading Spanish Government officials.

Dekton will be officially launched in the UK at 100% Design in Earls Court, London, 18-21 September.

When NSS visited Cosentino last year to see the company’s new development, Group Chairman Francisco Martínez-Cosentino said Dekton was the result of his visits to kitchen studios. He had been asked for a material that Silestone could not be. He spoke to his research & development team and after more than five years Dekton was the result.

When Sr Martínez-Cosentino started working for the company 40 years ago it had eight employees and a quarry. Today it still has the quarry but its factory in Spain covers a million square metres, there are Cosentino Centres in 15 countries and the company employs 2,200 people. “I believe that to survive a company has to innovate and if we don’t innovate as market leaders and sell internationally we will die.

“I believe what we are doing is complementing natural stone. We’re in a more industrial world, more design led and more sustainable.

“Quartz was a revolution in the stonemasonry industry, where they were losing out to products such as Corian or steel or laminate or glass. Quartz has been very good for the stonemason. Dekton will take them into new areas again. It’s a product that does not have to stay in the kitchen and bathroom. It will be used to clad many buildings.”

Dekton will be available in 10, 20 and 30mm thicknesses in slabs of 320cm x 144cm. It will, says Sr Martínez-Cosentino, give stone processors a sector of the market “that right now stone is not dominating”.

He says: “I have to convince more than stonemasons to use Dekton. I have to convince the clients of the stonemasons. If I had listened only to the stonemasons I would not have launched Silestone. First I had to convince the clients. When they were asking for Silestone the stonemasons were convinced.”

One of the products Dekton will be competing against is Lapitec, which has been developed by Breton, the company that invented the plant for making engineered quartz. This time it is making and selling the material itself.

Lapitec is a ceramic-based product designed and developed in Italy. Breton says it is “an innovative material which combines and blends design appeal with superior mechanical and physical properties, far better than any porcelain product available on the market.

Lapitec is available in a choice of plain colours or with veining in a range of surface finishes produced using technology, machinery and know-how developed by Breton. The materials have various finishes and friction coefficients to make the material ideal for whatever furnishing, architectural context or application it is required without altering its physical and mechanical properties.

One of the first ceramic slabs introduced to the stone market was imported by London wholesalers MGLW. It is Neolith from an Italian company called The Size. If you want to see it go to Bank underground station, where there is a lot of it on the walls and floors.

Rogerio Moutinho at MGLW says Neolith has become a victim of its own success and The Size has struggled to maintain supplies, although that is being rectified now with the installation of a new production line that should be on-stream in September or October.

Neolith is also sold by B-Stone, the wholesaler based in Northampton, which has put so much emphasis on it that it now describes itself on its website as a “Ceramic, Natural Stones & Quartz Slab Supplier”, in that order.

The Spanish company Levantina, with depots in the UK in Rotherham and Basingstoke, has invested in a factory making high technology ceramic tiles that it sells under the Techlam name.

Techlam is 3 mm thick and available in panels up to 1 x 3m, although it comes in a range of sizes and colours suitable for use as wall covering and cladding, flooring and paving, countertops, fittings and rainscreens.

Beltrami, in Halesowen, sells Marmocer, which is a ceramic tile with a 4mm natural stone veneer on top. It used to sell Trafficstone quartz but now sells a product it has branded B-Quartz instead. It has introduced a new range of natural stone called Convento, which has an antiqued finish and comes in random lengths of fixed, 200mm widths.

Another relative newcomer that likes to compare itself favourably with stone as “having a marble-like texture” but “greater strength and resistance to weathering than granite” is Neopariés, which is starting to appear at stone wholesalers. It is described as being a cross between glass and ceramic that can, like solid surfaces such as DuPont’s almost generic Corian, be reformed into convex and concave panels for columns and inside and outside curved corners.

One of London’s stone wholesalers that sells it is Ivan Nowrouzi’s Stoneville, in Brentford, which is also the exclusive distributor in Europe of Ecoglass, made by an American company in China entirely from recycled glass – and therefore promoted as being free from the resins or glues from the petrochemical industry that are used in quartz.

It is sold in 1440 x 3060mm slabs, 20mm or 30mm thick at prices that start at more than £200 a square metre. In the three years that Stoneville has been selling it, it has grown to account for 60% of the company’s business. “We have worked hard to promote it to architects and get it specified,” says Ivan. Among the higher profile projects for which he has supplied it are Flutes champagne bar at Dublin airport and 1 Hyde Park in London.

Stoneville exhibited Ecoglass at the Natural Stone Show at ExCeL this year, where Ivan says it received a lot of interest and he made many good contacts.

He explains how he came to stock glass: “Without us noticing it we lost business for splashbacks to glass, so I started stocking glass for splashbacks.” By searching for suppliers he also became aware of Neopariés and Ecoglass, which can be used for worktops and other products being made of stone by his customers. Stone processors can work the glass products using marble processing tools rather than tools used for granite.

A particular attraction of the glass products for the stone wholesaler is that there is less competition for it than there is for quartz.

Another new product is MaxTop, which is an 8mm engineered quartz veneer on a polypropylene honeycomb board. It is extremely light, so comes in boards up to 2.2m x 5.5m, and is easily manufactured on site or in the workshop. It is glued together with an epoxy adhesive with almost seamless joints.

It does not require the specialist machinery of a stone processing company to work MaxTop and, frankly, a reasonably skilled DIYer could probably install it – but then reasonably skilled DIYers install chipboard laminate kitchen worktops but they are still also installed by professional kitchen fitters.

The suppliers of the Korean-made product hope to gain distribution through the specialist contractor route as another product for the stone sector that can compete with other kinds of laminate products at the more price conscious end of the market.

You can see a video of MaxTop being installed at www.kitchen-worktops.tv, a new website that aims to become a directory of products and fitting services. Vernon Witheridge is the National Sales Manager. He has many years experience in the worktop market, mainly with solid surfaces. His phone number is on the website, or you can fill in a form there to leave a message.

Of course, it is not just new man-made products that are vying for space in the stone wholesalers’ warehouses and yards. There is still a lot of the genuine natural product to be seen and wholesalers compete hard to find the best sources of the most popular stones, as well as novel sources of more decorative and exotic stones that prove popular at the still lucrative top end of the market.

As one long-established wholesaler told NSS: “There’s still a lot of private money out there; the guy who wants to spend a few million on his house.”

Rogerio Moutinho even says that his company, MGLW in London, is doing so well with high end exotics that it is considering dropping the man-made ranges it currently sells and devoting the space to stock more natural stone.

It is not just in granite that customers are looking for more figurative material. Marble and onyx are increasingly sought after for bathrooms and as feature walls in other rooms of the house.

The top end of the market has always tended to prefer natural materials, but some of the wholesalers report a return to natural materials away from quartz throughout the market, which they attribute to familiarity with quartz that has reduced its novelty value and led to the realisation that granite is often less expensive.

As Rogerio at MGLW says: “Quartz is still big because it’s easy for designers to pick a colour, but it’s becoming not so much of a statement any more.”

All the wholesalers want to try to attract the client and his or her designers and architects to their premises to see the stones on offer because they know it is the best way to move people on from Star Galaxy and Kashmir Gold.

If they can’t get their customers’ customers into their premises, the next best thing is to get them to look at the products on a website. And websites are developing – turn to page 36 to see how The Marble & Granite Centre has developed its site to show the slabs it has in stock in a meaningful way as part of its increased use of information technology and social media as a marketing tool.

It is not just a fall in the size of the market that the established wholesalers have had to deal with. There are also new players in the supply chain – the newest being Krishna Sai Granites (KSG) from India, for which Patrick Land, who has spent 35 years in the trade, opened a warehouse in Nottingham as the company promoted its UK business at the Natural Stone Show in ExCeL London this year.

KSG was established in 1992, producing Black Galaxy Blocks from the extensive quarry area in Ongole, on the east coast of India in the province of Andra Pradesh.

Today, it extracts some 40,000m3 of Black Galaxy a year, along with 6,000m3 of Steel Grey and 6,000m3 of Indian Black Pearl, as well as SK Blue, Tan Brown and Miracle White. With access to the materials, owner Hanuman Rao Sidda made a massive investment in two state-of-the-art production units that comprise eight Gaspari Menotti gang saws, two Breton

22-head polishing lines, a resining plant from Simec and diamond wire saws from Bideseimpianti.

The two units and the quarries now employ 1,500 people and produce more than 450,000m2 of finished slab a year.

KSG UK Ltd not only supplies the stones from the company’s own quarries, it also sells other granites from South India, Brazil, South Africa, Spain, Italy and Scandinavia, some of them exclusive to KSG.

Another international stone giant has established an outlet in the UK at Park Royal, London, trading as Stone Yard, which is another company that was exhibiting at the Natural Stone Show this year.

Stone Yard has already expanded into a second warehouse at Park Royal in order to hold 6,000 slabs in stock in the UK made up of 130 different granites, 30 marbles, onyx, slate, travertine and Opal engineered quartz.

Imityaz Prasla, the General Manager at Park Royal, says the group has companies on every continent and in the two decades that it has been trading has supplied stone to many prestigious projects, especially in Dubai. It is currently supplying the stone for a major football stadium being built in Qatar.

With so much stone to choose from around the world and clients and their architects and designers in the UK always searching for novelty, it is not surprising that stone wholesalers still have such an important role to play in stone distribution. It is a testament to the importance of that role that so few wholesalers have left the market since the downturn and that new wholesalers are still entering it.

Imports of stone remain flat and less comes from Europe

The vast majority of the stone sold by the industry’s wholesalers is imported and its arrival is noted by HM Revenue & Customs, which likes to take its cut. As a result, the import figures give the industry its most reliable figures about trade. This does not give the whole picture because some of the stone imported to the UK arrives under different commodity codes. Nevertheless, it does produce comparable figures over time that should identify trends.

The different categories that include stone make it possible to separate out slate and some hard landscaping, but it is not possible to separate building stone from memorials, so the figures here presented as building stone (excluding slate and hard landscaping) include memorials, most of which are also imported. However, the memorial side of the industry is small and on the graphs the figures when slate and hard landscaping has been removed are described as ‘building stone’, even though they include memorials.

The figures presented here use the value of stone rather than volumes because the value tends to be less likely to undergo major amendments over time. The trends identified by the price are reflected by the volumes, although the Government has recorded a big increase in the volume of imports last year that is not reflected in the value. The volume figure will probably be amended in the months ahead but as it stands indicates a significant drop in price of stone from outside the European Union (imports from within the EU are termed ‘arrivals’ by the Government).

Values are in sterling and are, therefore, affected by changes in the exchange rate. The graph below shows how the exchange rate with the Euro and the US Dollar has fluctuated over the past few years – by as much as 15%.

The trend towards buying less expensive stone from outside Europe has continued and in spite of rising prices of European stone the value of arrivals from Europe has continued on a downward trend.

­Read more about the stone market in the UK 

Fyfe Glenrock supplies Kemnay for new floors at Marischal College

Marischal College in ‘The Granite City’ or ‘Silver City’ of Aberdeen is said to be the second largest granite building in the World. These days it is the home of Aberdeen City Council and last year the scaffolding came down after two years on a £40million redevelopment by Holmes Architects with new floors in the local Kemnay granite supplied by Fyfe Glenrock, stone wholesaler Pisani’s Scottish arm.

Pisani, for many years the biggest stone wholesaler in the UK, is based in Feltham, London. It has undergone some changes in the economic downturn by pulling out of machinery sales and selling off its memorial wholesaling arm of Frank England to the management. There have been rumours that Fyfe Glenrock had also been sold, but it has not and manager Allan Bruce says Fyfe Glenrock ended 2012 with the best order book it had ever had.

Fyfe Glenrock processes two Scottish granites – Corrennie as well as Kemnay – from quarries owned by Breedon where faces are maintained for block stone production. The granite is processed at Fyfe Glenrock, which has one of the UK stone industry’s best equipped factories.