Istanbul is the hub of Türkiye’s footwear production, however cities like Konya, Kayseri and Gaziantep are currently reviving their shoemaking traditions. The Aegean city of Izmir is Türkiye’s second largest footwear producing area and held its 13th Footwear and Accessories Fair in March, 2003. Many local exhibitors came to the show from the specialist ‘shoe city’ of Isikkent on the outskirts of Izmir.
Izmir contains over 3,000 production units, but too many are defined by their problems. Most units are not automated and keep capacity at between 50 and 200 pairs daily. Many workers have minimal skills and makers pay punitive energy costs and cite bureaucracy and a flimsy tax structure as hindrances. High quality soles must also be imported. A Turkish-based technical consultant for Dutch footwear maker Van Gastel has pointed out the difficulties of making shoes without standardised production criteria or industrial benchmarks. Component prices, too, are never steady. About 60,000 workers produce footwear in the Aegean region, and this reaches 100,000 with casual labour included. About 40% of production is all-leather.
Not surprisingly, Chinese imports are a nightmare. Only two or three Aegean footwear producers have automated or CAD-CAM lines or sufficient capacity - approximately 2,000 pairs daily - to compete globally. Imports of plastic footwear cost $2 or $3 and, even with an import quota of 1.4 million pairs of Chinese shoes, local producers have little chance, as all-leather shoes average $13 to $25 per pair. Izmir producers complain that some exporting countries are lowering invoice values on goods inward to Türkiye. "We have no official import-export procedure with other emerging markets," said one local manufacturer of children’s footwear. Customs officials have difficulty coping with the increasing variety of components imported under different categories for each fashion season.
Many footwear items that incorporate more plastic than leather fall within the same ‘all-leather’ harmonised statistics. As with garments, the ‘grey-market’ trade in Istanbul accounted for $500 million of footwear exports to Russia, against documented exports of $115 to $120 million. Consequently, serious producers give Russia a wide berth.
The Aegean region exported some 1.5 million pairs in 2002, valued at $10.5 million. Production was about 16-18 million pairs in the same period, but capacity is 35 to 40 million pairs. Aegean producers are committed and some, particularly producers of children’s shoes are excellent. The industry’s most urgent requirement is to train technicians in all aspects of footwear production. This is just beginning in Turkey and, surprisingly, a second school for one EU-inspired project plans to locate in Ankara, a city with only one sizeable shoe factory.
