Vietnam is now responsible for 10% of the world footwear exports

In this decade China’s share of world footwear exports fell by 12 percentage points from 73.1% in 2011 to 61.1% in 2020. At the continental level, this was offset by the rise in Vietnamese and Indonesian exports which grew from 2.0% and 1.6% of the world total in 2011 to 10.2% and 3.0% in 2020, mitigating Asia’s drop in exports.

With this, in 2020, Vietnam had a share of 10.2% in the world total exports, resulting in the sale of more than 1.2 billion pairs coming from the Asian country in the international markets.

Also on the rise, Turkey climbed one more step this year to become the world’s fifth largest exporter, close behind Germany, which occupies the 4^th position. Germany has also shown strong performance in the last decade, overtaking Belgium and Italy as Europe’s largest footwear exporter.

COVID-19 disrupted international value-chains leading to a reduction of the percentage of production exported from 62% to 59%, i.e., 12.1 billion pairs. Asia was the origin of most of the footwear exported in 2020, as it had been in the previous years, but its share of the world total has been slowly declining over the last ten years, and this trend continued in 2020. The same is happening with every other continent but Europe, as its share of world exports has increased by almost 4 percentage points since 2011.

The country has been heavily impacted by a recent wave of COVID-19. For recent news on the imapct of the pandemic please refer to the following articles: