Ministry Of Industry: Local Shoe Industry Encourages Indonesia's Economy To Global

JAKARTA - Secretary of the Directorate General of Small and Medium Industries and the Ministry of Industry (Kemenperin) Riefky Yuswandi said the local footwear industry was able to push the Indonesian economy to the global level.

"Until the second quarter of 2024, the performance of the national footwear industry was able to grow by 3.92 percent compared to last year in the same period," Riefky said as quoted by ANTARA, Sunday, September 22.

In fact, Riefky continued, data from the World Footwear Book 2023 lists Indonesia as the top five footwear producing countries, which produced 807 million pairs of footwear globally last year.

Of the 807 million pairs, around 445 million pairs were exported, which means that 55.4 percent of Indonesia's footwear production is sold to various countries, thus demonstrating the productivity and ability of the workforce and domestic industry which are quite taken into account.

Riefky predicts that footwear exports in 2024 will exceed the realization of footwear exports by 2023 which reached 6.4 billion US dollars.

"We believe that in 2024 there will still be an increase, because seeing exports from January to June has reached 3.7 billion US dollars. We hope that the next semester will be maintained and bigger," he also said.

Although the local footwear export market is very large, Riefky said the domestic market potential has not been maximized because only 362 million pairs of total production have been absorbed by the domestic market.

According to him, this number is very small compared to the total population of Indonesia, which reaches more than 282 million people, considering that this absorption means that one Indonesian only buys one to two pairs.

In fact, nowadays everyone has two pairs of footwear, so the potential for domestic markets must be explored more, including through various innovations and executions.

"If the domestic market is maximized, the consumption of national footwear will certainly increase from now on, which is only 1.28 pairs per person per year," he said.

Riefky also emphasized that his party already has a machine restructuring program, one of which is to encourage local creative industries such as footwear.

Through this program, entrepreneurs have a 25 percent chance of reimbursing machine prices for imported machines and 40 percent for local machines, so they will become working capital.

In addition to the program, the Head of the Indonesian Footwear Industry Empowerment Center (BPIPI) of the Directorate General of Small and Medium Industries and Aneka Syukur Idayati said that his party also has the Indonesia Footwear Creative Competition (IFC) program to support local industries.

BPIPI consistently organizes IFCs every year in collaboration with universities as an effort to collaborate between the designer, photographer and videographer professions with the footwear industry.

For this year, BPIPI's IFCC synergizes with Ciputra University and has been followed by 211 works in On The Spot Competition (OTC) Surabaya, 124 works in Yogyakarta OTC, and 291 works through online registration that come from design, photography, and videography.