Shoemakers stay calm at anti-dumping duties
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2006-10-08 09:40

As an important shoe manufacturing base on the Chinese mainland, Wenzhou in eastern Zhejiang Province is home to nearly 4,000 shoemakers, employing more than 400,000 workers and producing 600 million pairs of shoes annually.

Last year, Wenzhou exported 438 million pairs of shoes at a combined value of 1.58 billion U.S. dollars. One third of the exports were sold to the EU. Wenzhou's leather shoes export to EU accounts for about one fourth of China's total to EU.

But customs statistics show that in June and July, the shoes export from Wenzhou dropped by 7.17 percent from the year-earlier level.

"At the highly globalized international market today, the 16.5 percent anti-dumping duties will not only drag China's shoemakers down from their superior position amidst fierce competition but also make it hard for the medium-and small-sized firms to survive," said Xu.

What's more, the anti-dumping duty sanction runs counter to the free trade policy initiated by the European Commission and it will not save the declining shoe-making industry of EU in a real sense, he said.

The EU's latest move on anti-dumping duties was also widely criticized by European business and consumer groups, which say that such measures will lead to job losses in the retail sector, and hurt millions of consumers

"An old Chinese saying says moving stones can roll over your own feet. Though the anti-dumping duty is a strike for Chinese shoes firms, the EU retailers and consumers are also victims of the EU's decision," Zhou Yaohua, vice president of the Wenzhou-based Dongyi Shoe-making Com.,Ltd., told Xinhua on Saturday.

To counteract the impact of EU's anti-dumping tariffs, Chinese shoe manufactures have shifted their eyesight on the new markets in Southeast Asia, South America and Oceania as well as speeding up expansion of the domestic market.

"We have made preparations to open the markets in South America and Australia since the EU planned to carry out anti-dumping investigation last year," said Xu.

The orders from EU have decreased obviously since it imposed the anti-dumping tariffs in April, but our overseas sales volume so far is almost equal to that of last year as the sales in the new markets had increased rapidly, said Xu.

The Aokang Group, the country's second largest shoemaker, focuses more on the mainland market to diversify the risk of intensifying competition at overseas market.

Aokang plans to invest 1 billion yuan (126.58 million U.S. dollars) to build a western shoe-making capital in the southwestern municipality of Chongqing.

"The low labor price and huge market in western China are not resistable for the development of Aokang," said Wang Zhentao, Aokang's president.

In addition, to tackle the tariff issue, Chinese shoe firms have also begun to build overseas factories in Russia, Nigeria and even in EU member countries.
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