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WORLD FOOTWEAR | JULY/AUGUST 2012
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th
some 2.4% annually to 2020.
The magazine has achieved a status
within the industry that few can match
internationally and its panel of writers
and contributors are acknowledged as
experts in their respective fields. Steve
Lee, of Steve Lee Associates, is one of
them and this assessment of the global
footwear market and its future relies
heavily on his painstaking assembly of
facts and figures that are difficult to
come by. Inevitably there is a time lapse
in gathering statistics; methods change,
too, and so many of the tables focus on
the period 1994-2009.
Analysing figures for the period 1994
to 2009, the following table indicates
that footwear production increased by
a staggering 54% in just 15 years, from
a global figure of 12,905 million to
19,883, million, with China being the
lead player as shown in
Table 1
. It was
only when the most recent recession
really bit in 2009 that footwear
production dropped by 1.4% from 2008
(in the same period GDP had fallen
5.1%). There are estimates that put
world production in 2010 for all
footwear made from any material in
excess of 20 billion.
IN AND OUT
The following two tables illustrate
which countries were the principal
performers in terms of imports and
exports and between 1994 and 2009.
Imports and exports both doubled
between 1994 and 2008 before again
falling between 2008 and 2009. Four
main import sinks took the vast
majority of exported footwear in 2009
and the mammoth imports to the US
reflect the virtual collapse of footwear
manufacturing in that country. Europe,
the Rest of Asia (excluding China, India
and Vietnam) and then Africa
(excluding Nigeria) were the other
principal importer areas. China is the
undisputed leader in exports, with close
to six times the volume of West and
East European countries combined.
CHANGES IN CONSUMPTION
The big change in consumption
between 1994 and 2009 was increasing
demand from China, India and the Rest
of Asia. Regionally, Asia dominated
Table 1 - Footwear production 1994 - 2009
Table 2 - Footwear imports 1994 - 2009
Table 3 - Footwear exports 1994 - 2009
Table 4 - Pairs Per Capita Consumption 1994 – 2009
Table 5 - Data for 2010