Cambria CEO wins quartz tariffs, rivals warn of higher prices

Marty Davis has turned Cambria’s quartz campaign into a tariff victory, a result that competitors say will protect one Minnesota manufacturer while raising costs for everyone else who buys, cuts or installs imported stone.

Davis, who has run Cambria since 2000, built the company from one of two employees in Le Sueur, Minnesota, into a private business he says now employs roughly 1,800 people and generates about $500 million in annual sales. At a U.S. International Trade Commission hearing on Feb. 24, Davis said Cambria and the domestic industry needed safeguard relief from a “deluge of imports” over the past five years. He described Cambria as the largest producer of natural quartz surfaces in the United States and said foreign suppliers had benefited from dumped and intellectual-property-violating imports.

The fight began as a safeguard case filed on Sept. 15, 2025, then supplemented on Sept. 23 and Nov. 17, before the commission deemed it properly filed on Nov. 17. The Quartz Manufacturing Alliance of America brought the petition, with Cambria Company LLC, Dal-Tile LLC, Guidoni USA and Architectural Surfaces, Inc. initially on board. Architectural Surfaces later withdrew and Hyundai L&C USA joined. The commission called the case “extraordinarily complicated,” set an April 1, 2026 deadline for its serious-injury determination and planned to send its report to the president by May 18.

Safeguard remedies under Section 201 are temporary and apply to imports from all countries, giving the White House broad discretion over whether to impose them. That structure makes the case a useful test of how targeted tariffs can be deployed as a competitive weapon. Davis, a longtime Trump donor, has framed his push as a defense of American manufacturing jobs and “free and fair trade,” but rivals argue it also redraws the market in Cambria’s favor.

The opposition includes a coalition of large importers, small businesses and home builders, all warning that higher duties will flow through to consumers. Marble Uniques, an Indiana company that cuts imported quartz slabs and other stone countertops to order and employs about 30 people, said it may not be able to pass the full tariff cost along to customers. Its warning goes to the center of the dispute: the burden of protection can fall not only on foreign suppliers, but on local fabricators, contractors and homeowners trying to finish kitchens and bathrooms on budget.

Cambria has argued that earlier trade action proved the point. In its China antidumping and countervailing-duty case, Davis said tariff rates reached more than 400% in some instances after the U.S. International Trade Commission backed the petition in 2019. Cambria says that relief helped trigger more than $400 million in new U.S. quartz factory investment by other companies, while Cambria itself put more than $100 million into a new Le Sueur plant. The new tariff fight suggests the industry has not settled into open competition so much as a cycle in which access to Washington increasingly determines who gets to set the rules.