Brazilian tanning industry leader looks to the future
Augusto Coelho, president of the Brazil Centre of Tanning Industries (CICB) and director for foreign trade at the Curtume Moderno tannery in Petrolina, North East Brazil, has outlined his views on the future of the industry.
Interviewed for World Leather magazine, Mr Coelho highlighted the continuing migration of the industry to the West and North of the country - the main spur being the shift from ranching to arable farming in the South and Southeast.
With the move, the slaughterhouses and meat packers had increasingly woken up the opportunities presented by processing to wet blue, leading Mr Cuelho to predict that it would be normal practice for tanneries to buy their raw materials in this form before too long. The knock-on effect was that the larger tanneries were increasingly concentrating their output on crust and finished leather for export, especially in the furniture grades.
Mr. Coelho observed: "Our companies are extremely advanced technologically and we have a huge supply capacity coupled with competitive production costs. But we must invest in marketing, branding and new markets."
In doing so, he stressed the need for the Brazilian leather sector to clearly define its future role in relation to it Chinese counterpart, which was becoming increasingly dominant on a world scale. Cuelho argued that the industry needed to decide whether it wanted to remain a supplier to China or to become a direct competitor, especially with regard to the leather upholstery cover sector.
The president went on to stress the need for the Brazilian government and the tanning sector to lobby harder for fiscal reform at international level, noting that while the industry continued to be dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises, a process of consolidation was under way. Steps needed to be taken now if the industry was not to fall into the hands of a small group of multinational operators in the long term, the president argued.
With regard to the environment, Cuelho observed that the environmental protection agencies of many Brazilian states were now at least the equal of their counterparts in the developed world. The president pointed out that such moves were an essential response to the growing environmental awareness among consumers and that many Brazilian tanners were now working towards ISO 14000.
