Office of the U.S. Trade Commission Announces Final 2018 Tariffs on Chinese Imports
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) released a list of approximately $200 billion worth of Chinese imports that will be subject to additional tariffs, including quartz and a range of natural stone products in both slab and block form, as well as flagstone and monumental building stone.
In accordance with the direction of President Donald Trump, the additional tariffs will be effective starting September 24, 2018, and initially will be in the amount of 10 percent. Starting January 1, 2019, the level of the additional tariffs will increase to 25 percent.
The list contains 5,745 full or partial lines of the original 6,031 tariff lines that were on a proposed list of Chinese imports announced in July. Changes to the proposed list were made after USTR and the interagency Section 301 Committee sought and received comments over a six-week period and testimony during a six-day public hearing in August. USTR engaged in a thorough process to examine the comments and testimony and, as a result, determined to fully or partially remove 297 tariff lines from the original proposed list.
A formal notice of the $200 billion tariff action has been published in the Federal Register. In the full, 194 page list a few of the relevant tariffs to the stone industry include:
2514.00.00 Slate, whether or not roughly trimmed or merely cut into blocks or slabs of a rectangular (including square) shape
2515.11.00 Marble and travertine, crude or roughly trimmed
2515.12.10 Marble, merely cut into blocks or slabs of a rectangular (including square) shape
2515.12.20 Travertine, merely cut into blocks or slabs of a rectangular (including square) shape
2515.20.00 Calcareous monument. or building stone (other than marble/travertine) of specific gravity >=2.5, and alabaster, crude, rough, trimmed or cut blocks or slabs
2516.11.00 Granite, crude or roughly trimmed
2516.12.00 Granite, merely cut into blocks or slabs of a rectangular (including square) shape
2516.20.10 Sandstone, crude or roughly trimmed
2516.20.20 Sandstone, merely cut into blocks or slabs of a rectangular (including square) shape
2516.90.00 Porphyry, basalt and other monumental or building stone (except granite/sandstone),
crude or roughly trimmed or cut into rectangular blocks/slabs
For more information, visit www.ustr.gov.