Vietnam earned over US $1.74 billion from shipping footwear abroad in the first four months of this year, making a year-on-year increase of 26.4%, according to the General Statistics Office (GSO).
The GSO said that the EU remains the biggest footwear importer of Vietnam with US $511 million in revenue in Q1 of this year, up 13.3% against the same period last year and accounting for over 40% of the country’s total footwear export turnover.
Export volumes to the US, Japan, Belgium, Holland, France, Denmark and Czech also rose by between 20 – 60%.
The EU’s removal of anti-dumping duty on Vietnamese leather-capped shoes on April 1, 2011 would help stabilize the export of this commodity in the near future, said General Secretary of the Vietnam Leather and Footwear Association (LEFASO) Nguyen Thi Tong.
LEFASO forecasted that footwear exports this year would earn US $ 5.5 billion in turnover./.