The Italian footwear industry records a decline in the main indicators in the first nine months of 2024. Declines in exports (-9.2% in value on January-September 2023) with the sharp reduction in orders, had heavy repercussions on production activity (-18.9%) Istat index of industrial production) and turnover (-9.7%). This is the picture taken by the report of the Confindustria Accessori Moda Study Center for Assocalzaturifici, which shows how, with the effect of the post-Covid rebound over, and after a 2023 of substantial stability (at least in value), 2024 closes with negative signs in all the main variables. Estimating a sectoral turnover that the first 12-month projections show slowing by -9.3 percent, to 13.2 billion euros (almost 1.4 billion less than the previous year) and with inevitable effects on business demographics and employment.

“In the third quarter of 2024 there was no turnaround in the sector's economic situation,” explains Giovanna Ceolini, president of Assocalzaturifici, ”on the contrary, more than 60 percent of companies closed with turnover below the levels achieved in the same period of 2023, with reductions of more than -20 percent for 1 out of 5 companies. The cumulative data for the first 9 months therefore confirm the difficulties that had already emerged in the first part of the year. The reflective performance of many major international economies, in Europe and outside the EU, and a geopolitical context that is anything but favorable, which has seen the addition, in addition to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, of another front of instability in the Middle East, have severely penalized footwear exports in 2024. If in the European Union sales show fairly moderate declines (-2.6 percent in value overall, with -2 percent in France and -6.2 percent in Germany), on non-EU markets the drop is -15.3 percent. Results on which were undoubtedly also weighed by the slowdown suffered by many luxury brands, whose development had contributed in recent years to sustaining sector dynamics.”

In detail, the report shows how, with reference to foreign demand, the trend is unfavorable for all product segments, with the sole exception of shoes with rubber uppers, whose exports grew by +8.2 percent in volume and +1.3 percent in value. On the other hand, shoes with leather uppers - which have always been characteristic of Italian production and cover 65 percent of foreign sales in value - recorded contractions of -7.1 percent in quantity and -8.2 percent in value.

Examining the markets, EU partners overall show less penalizing dynamics than those related to non-EU countries. Among the latter, positive signals only from China (+1.7 percent in value, with +19 percent in quantities), Hong Kong (+8.7 percent) and especially the United Arab Emirates (+26.3 percent), despite a moderate decline in pairs for both; and then Turkey, with increases over 10 percent in both volume and value. Among the countries marked by negative dynamics, Switzerland stands out, although the collapse in flows suffered in the first 9 months of 2024 (-51.3% in value and -35.4% in quantity) is to be attributed, as repeatedly commented above, to a change in the distribution strategies of luxury brands, which have replaced transit in Swiss warehouses with direct shipment to final destination markets.

Finally, the prolongation of the unfavorable economic phase resulted in negative balances in the first 9 months of 2024, compared to the close of 2023, in the figures for the birth-mortality of companies (-144 active shoe factories, equal to -4%) and employment (which showed a decrease of -2. 619 employees, equal to -3.6%), as well as a surge in the use of wage supplementation tools: in the leather industry, the authorized hours of layoffs rose to 26 million (a +139.4% over the 10.9 million hours in January-September 2023), which is more than 4.5 times those granted in the same pre-Covid 2019 period.