Two things are happening in the U.S. market. They've stopped building houses. That's the biggest problem for us. The problem when they stop building houses hits you on the wood side, because that's what they build the houses out of. But that's also usually the first indicator of a downturn in their economy more broadly. When that happens, what you tend to see is that they advertise less, and that impacts our paper side. A newspaper is essentially always the same size, from a news standpoint. It only grows in size when people start to advertise more. So that part of the market gets hit. You get a double whack from that.
We know that the U.S. market is going to come back. We've seen a slight uptick in their building. They have significant inventory to get rid of, but they will start to build homes again. Will they reach the $1.5 million levels again? Probably not, but even if they get up to $1 million or $1.1 million, that will be massively helpful. It would represent about a $400,000 or $500,000 increase over what we're at now.
That said, I think one of the important strategies for the industry is to diversify away from its dependence on the U.S. market. If you become very dependent on one particular marketplace, as we have over our history—we've traditionally sent about 70% of our products there—we're very vulnerable to whatever happens in their economy. So we're very encouraged by the aggressive trade agenda being pursued right now, because it's opening up all sorts of new markets.
We're also re-establishing ourselves in existing markets, such as Japan, where we have been for a long time. Equally, when you look at India, China, and all those very important marketplaces where we hope to grow, we can get ourselves away from our dependence on the U.S. marketplace and its vagaries.