Vietnam's leather & footwear exports jump 30%

01 Oct '11

2 min read

Vietnam's leather and footwear export volumes jumped to US$ 4.8 billion during the initial nine months of the current year, registering a 30 percent rise, according to the General Statistics Office (GSO) data.

For four consecutive months since June, the industry has achieved a growth rate of US$ 550-640 million per month.

This rise in export volumes is mainly attributable to the EU lifting the anti-dumping duty that it had imposed on imports of Vietnam made leather-upper shoes since April this year.

The EU's move persuaded importers to move their orders from China to Vietnam as the former is still subjected to a duty of 16.5 percent.

In spite of this positive development, several Vietnamese footwear manufacturers are still wary in accepting export orders due to high cost of raw materials and labour in the domestic market.

The Vietnamese producers have already bagged sufficient number of orders to keep them busy till close of the current year, and some contracts have been already negotiated for next year as well.

The industry plans to achieve six billion USD mark in exports by close of the current year, for which the experts believe that the producers would be required to expand their production lines and also work on quality enhancement.

In order to boost competitiveness of the businesses, alongside the export market, extra attention would also be required to be paid to the local market.

The industry has fixed a target of achieving US$ 9.1 billion in exports by 2015, US$ 14.5 billion by 2020 and US$ 21 billion by 2025.

It looks forward to achieve an average annual growth rate of 10.9 percent in export value during the 2011-15 period and 9.7 percent during both 2016-20 and 2021-25 periods.

Fibre2fashion News Desk - India

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