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JULY/AUGUST 2012 | www.footwearbiz.com
A
25th anniversary is the perfect opportunity to take
a retrospective look at the world footwear market,
a chance to reflect on how far we have come in
the past two-and-a-half decades and to make
some predictions as to what the footprint might be in the
coming years.
When
World Footwear
made its entrance twenty-five years
ago in May 1987, the world population was a whisper away
from hitting five billion (this apparently occurred on July 11
that year). According to the United Nations, in October 2011
the world population had grown to seven billion. Not
surprisingly, the demand for footwear has grown at an
astonishing rate, fed by increasing standards of living in
most parts of the world as the global GDP or gross domestic
product has grown from $16,160.36 billion in 1987 to an
estimated $78,897.426 billion in 2011. Forecasting future
growth is not easy, as the world has been through some
rocky economic times recently, but it is expected to grow by
The global footprint
A STATISTICAL VIEW OF THE FOOTWEAR WORLD
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