The World Footwear Yearbook 2021 announced Vietnam’s share of the global footwear market rose to over 10% for the first time.

Vietnam remains the second-largest shoe exporter in the world. Photo: The Hanoi Times

Vietnam News Agency referred to the statistics from the German footwear industry website Schoez.biz on March 2 which noted Chinese market share of global footwear export declined by 12% for the past decade from 73.1% in 2011 to 61.1% in 2020, while that of Vietnam rose to 10.2% from around 2% during the period.

In 2020, Vietnam exported a total of 1.2 billion pairs of shoes and ranked second in terms of footwear exports, the Portuguese Footwear, Components, Leather Goods Manufacturers’ Association (APICCAPS) noted in the World Footwear Yearbook 2021.

China remained the largest footwear exporter with over 7.4 billion pairs of shoes in 2020, while Indonesia claimed the third spot, behind Vietnam, with 366 million pairs of shoes, or 3% of the market share.

Germany and Turkey stood in fourth and fifth place with respective market shares of 2.5% and 2.3%, with the former overtaking Belgium and Italy to become the largest European shoe exporter in the past 10 years.

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the global value chains and resulted in lower shoes making capacity and exports proportion from 62% to 59% with around 12.1 billion pairs of shoes were exported globally in 2020.

As in previous years, China was the production hub of the majority of shoe exports in 2020, but its proportion in shoe exports globally had gradually been on the decline in the past decade. Europe is the only continent with a higher shoe export share with an increase of nearly 4% since 2011.

China continued to be the largest shoes buyers with 3.9 billion pairs of shoes, or 20.8% of the global market, followed by India with 2 billion (10.6%), the US with 1.8 billion (9.6%), Indonesia with 821 million (4.3%) and Brazil 3.6%.