The Southern State That Imported $5.3 Billion In Raw Metals Last Year

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Louisiana is known for its Mardi Gras celebrations, jazz and blues music, and great food. It's also a state where you don't want to have a pizza delivered to someone's house as a practical joke and police make significantly less money on average than many other parts of the nation.

Yet spices, instruments, and plastic beads are not what make up the bulk of Louisiana's imports. Rather, its raw metals. As of 2024, Louisiana imported $5.3 billion worth of raw metals, a report from Visual Capitalist said. About $2.4 billion of those raw metal imports is refined copper, according to The Observatory of Economic Complexity.

In addition, more than two billion kilograms of steel, or nearly 8% of the market share imported into the U.S., passed through the Port of New Orleans last year. In terms of aluminum, about 381 million kilograms of aluminum is imported through Port of New Orleans, which amounts to a 4.3% share of the nation's total.

The state's appetite for such materials may soon grow, too. Australian company Element 25 is slated to build a $480 million plant in Louisiana's Ascension Parish. There, it will import manganese sulphate monohydrate from its mine in western Australia for processing into materials that can be used to build electric vehicle batteries and other electrical components. And the Hyundai Motor Group will spend $5.8 billion constructing a facility in Donaldsonville where nearly 4 million tons of iron ore will be imported annually to produce coils, according to the Louisiana Office of Economic Development.

The raw metals imported into Louisiana not only help provide the materials needed to build car battery components or steel for cars. They also help create the infrastructure needed for some of Louisiana's largest industries such as logistics, energy production, and manufacturing. And the growth in the number of manufacturing jobs in Louisiana outpaces the national average in recent years, an analysis by Axios found.

According to a report from the Business Roundtable, an association of hundreds of business executives across the U.S., international trade is huge in Louisiana. As of 2018, more than 570,500 in Louisiana are supported by international trade. That same year, Louisiana companies and entrepreneurs exported $53.2 billion in goods and $10.3 billion in services. What helped make Louisiana competitive was what used to be the lower cost of importing raw metals and other materials from abroad, the report added.

But now the cost of imported metals have soared to tariffs on foreign goods that have been enacted, or may soon be enacted, by the Trump administration. Both consumers and business owners in Louisiana are expected to be hit by Trump's tariffs, including metal suppliers, according to an article in the Shreveport Times. The executive vice president of a boat manufacturer in Berwick told a news reporter from KATC Channel 3 that tariffs as high as 50% on metal imports have made aluminum harder to find and much more expensive.

However, advocates of tariffs believe they will encourage companies to move their manufacturing facilities to the U.S. to avoid the extra taxes. That still won't stop the government from taxing any imported materials to make domestically created goods. Yet the Trump-championed Big Beautiful Bill does allow companies to deduct the cost of building new manufacturing facilities in the U.S., an analysis by CNN said. So, maybe that will offset the cost?