Global footwear market yet to recover from severe dent of COVID-19

In 2019, a total of 24,016.88 million pairs of footwear were sold in the world, which reduced to 20,399.93 million pairs in 2020. Thus, around 14 per cent of the market was wiped out in one year, according to Fibre2Fashion’s market insight tool TexPro.

Earlier, the global footwear market was growing slowly, and it took four years to breach the mark of 24,000 million pairs in 2019 from 23,000 million pair in 2015.

As per TexPro, footwear sale recovered around 10 per cent to 22,492.72 million pairs in 2021. It is expected to grow to 23,730.66 million pairs in 2022, and to 24,395.11 million pairs in 2023.

Normally, footwear market should grow with population growth, but post-COVID culture drastically changed the market scenario. WFH reduced the demand of formal footwear as people do not need frequently to move outside of their home. Technology also influenced lifestyle of consumers who don’t need to go outside of home due to increasing practice of home delivery with the emergence of e-commerce.

Global footwear market will grow at the rate of 3.06 per cent annually between 2021-2026. It will reach 26,073.87 million pairs by 2026, according to TexPro. In terms of expected growth rate during 2021-26, Vietnam is expected to grow with the highest rate of 5.77 per cent, followed by Turkey, Brazil, Argentina and Egypt. In the highly populous countries of India and China, the annual growth rate is likely to be 2.73 per cent and 2.47 per cent respectively.

In terms of market size, China was largest country with 12,700 million pairs sold in 2021, followed by India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Brazil.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (KUL)