China: current shoe consumption could be 3 billion pairs a year
The China Leather Industry Association (CLIA) said in 2010 that it expected footwear consumption in China to double in the next few years, but pointed out that definitive statistics on the size of the domestic market at the moment were hard to put together.
CLIA president, Madam Zhang Shuhua, said at the time that she thought an average figure of 1.5 pairs per year for each of China's 1.3 billion people was a fair estimate, giving a total domestic market size of 1.95 billion pairs. This led immediately to debate in the global leather and footwear industries as to how suppliers might be able to keep up with a doubling of this demand, an extra 2 billion pairs of shoes a year.
However, a new article in the May-June issue of World Leather suggests that the size of China's domestic market may already be 3 billion pairs a year. China's two finalists for the 2011 Tannery of the Year competition, which takes place in Shanghai in early September, are both important suppliers of shoe upper leather to the domestic footwear industry. Extensive profiles of the two tanneries, Gansu Hongliang Leather and Xingye Leather Technology, appear in the May-June issue of World Leather.
Both tanneries are involved in rapid expansion programmes and both said they are doing this to keep up with growing demand for leather shoes among Chinese consumers.
Li Chen, president of Gansu Hongliang Leather, said he believed women in China's major cities may already be consuming an average of seven pairs of footwear a year: three pairs of shoes for spring and summer, and two pairs of shoes and two pairs of boots for autumn-winter.
The CIA Factbook suggests that women living in Chinese cities number more than 270 million. If Mr Li is correct, urban women would account for almost of the whole of the current estimate on their own. And if, at a conservative estimate, people in rural areas buy one pair each on average and urban men 1.5 pairs, it would give a total market size at the moment of 3.1 billion pairs a year, with considerable expansion to come.
SOURCE: FOOTWEARBIZ.COM