Nomura puts Chinese shoe consumption at 2.6 pairs per person
16/01/2014
In a discussion about the recent performance on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange of footwear manufacturers Stella and Belle International, the Financial Times quoted Nomura analysts as saying the levels of consumption of shoes among Chinese people was 2.6 pairs per person per year at the end of 2013.
At the end of 2010, official figures from the China Leather Industry Association put the level of annual consumption at 1.5 pairs per capita, an increase of 73.3%.
Taking 1.3 billion people as the rounded down population for both years, this means Chinese consumers increased their purchases of shoes from 1.95 billion in 2010 to almost 3.4 billion by the end of last year.
World Leather published a report in April-May 2011 suggesting that consumption among the country’s urban women was already at levels of around seven pairs per year each. This suggests consumption was already much higher than the China Leather Industry Association claimed at the time, and that a figure much closer to the one offered by Nomura to the Financial Times in January 2014 was already the level, of consumption in 2010 or 2011.
There are two ways of looking at this. If the official 2010 figure was accurate, growth in China’s domestic footwear market has been astonishing, 73.3%. If it, as World Leather reported at the time, it fell short of the real level of footwear consumption, China has already been consuming more than 3 billion pairs of shoes a year for several years.
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