Growth plans for government leather conglomerate in Venezuela
15/07/2016
Announcing the development on July 14, industry and commerce minister, Muguel Pérez Abad, said the new arrangements will become “an extremely important component of the Venezuelan economy”.
Since 2012, the leather and footwear sector in Venezuela has been dominated by a government-run co-operative called the Leather and Footwear Conglomerate, which sources raw material, produces leather and finished footwear and distributes the finished products to retail outlets all over the country. It has five stores of its own, in Maracaibo, Barquisimeto, San Antonio del Táchira and two in Caracas.
Mr Pérez Abad said the sector is directly responsible for 80,000 jobs in Venezuela at the moment and for 280,000 indirectly. It has the capacity to produce 94 million pairs of shoes per year, he said, which he claimed would satisfy 85% of national demand. This would put Venezuela’s annual footwear consumption at around 110 million pairs, roughly 3.5 pairs per person.
The minister said that the conglomerate is on track to produce 66 million pairs of shoes in 2016, around 70% of Venezuela’s total footwear output. But he said that the state-owned organisation aims to increase this figure to 102 million pairs per year by the end of 2019.
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