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This ancient seaside trading city is fast becoming the non-leather footwear hub of India.
With nearly 100 manufacturing units and roughly 500 ancillary units within a radius of 30-40 km, Kozhikode now churns out close to a third of India’s non-leather footwear output.
The city emerged as a key footwear manufacturing centre in the country in the past decade when the timber, tile and match industries, for which Kozhikode had been known for a long time, went down the horizon.
“There has been a 50 per cent annual growth in footwear manufacturing in Kozhikode in the past few years,” said V. Noushad, VP of the Confederation of Indian Footwear Industry and MD of VKC, a footwear firm with a turnover of Rs 890 crore. Manufacturers now talk of the global market, international designs and Italian and Taiwanese machinery.
“We the Kozhikode manufacturers look at China as our main competitor,” Noushad told Business Line .
Main Competitor
“China last year exported nearly $40 billion worth of products, while India’s export was about $ 2 billion.” About 80 per cent of India’s footwear exports consisted of leather products. But non-leather footwear is now making an impressive export performance.
Kozhikode’s footprint is visible on the soils of West Asia, Malaysia and Singapore.
The first footwear manufacturing facility in Kozhikode, a rubber ‘Hawaii chappal’ unit, was set up in the 1980s. The late 1990s saw a growth in the number of units.
“The real turnaround came after the 2006 footwear exhibition and seminar,” Noushad recalled. “It exposed the manufacturers to new technologies, new designs and a global market.”
This led to a flurry of activities such as import of latest machinery, adoption of Italian designs and exploration of markets outside India.
An exclusive industry association called Footwear Manufacturers Association of Kerala was born.
A footwear park was set up at Kinalur in Kozhikode district and a Rs 330-crore Footwear Design and Development Institute is being built by the Central Government.
New Designs
Noushad said footwear exhibitions held in 2009 and 2012 and a B2B meet in 2011 brought in a lot of buyers from abroad, thus giving Kozhikode’s reprocessed PVC and polyurethane footwear a foothold in the global market.
Brands like VKC, Paragon and Lunar made ad campaigns. “We want to showcase our products like the Chinese do,” Noushad said. “They hold huge international exhibitions twice a year which bring in large buyers from all over the world.”
“With new technologies and designs, we are capable of catching up with China in the near future,” Noushad said.
basheer.kpm@thehindu.co.in
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