中文India Courts Vietnam’s Footwear Machine: Inside CLE’s Pitch at the Ho Chi Minh City Summit
The Council for Leather Exports (CLE), India’s apex export promotion body for the leather and footwear sector, took its investment case directly to Asia’s most efficient footwear manufacturing nation last month. At the Vietnam Footwear Summit, held September 16–18 at the Mai House Saigon Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, CLE chairman Ramesh Juneja and vice chairman Mukhtarul Amin pitched Indian manufacturing capabilities to an audience of Vietnamese industry leaders — and made no secret of what India wants: capital, joint ventures and technical cooperation.
Addressing the summit on September 17, Amin presented India’s footwear and leather industry capabilities and invited Vietnamese companies to explore investment, joint ventures and technical cooperation in India. The pitch was built on complementarity rather than competition: Vietnam’s world-class experience in global footwear supply chains paired with India’s large domestic market, vast workforce and expanding manufacturing base.
The Numbers Behind the Courtship
The statistics CLE presented frame the opportunity honestly. India produced 3 billion pairs of footwear in 2024, while domestic consumption reached 2.858 billion pairs and exports stood at 266 million pairs. Read that again: India’s enormous production is overwhelmingly absorbed by its own market, and its export volumes are modest relative to its manufacturing scale. Vietnam, by contrast, was highlighted as the world’s second-largest footwear exporter by volume — a country of 100 million people that ships the bulk of its output to Western brands.
The growth trajectory CLE showcased was equally deliberate. Indian leather footwear exports rose from $1.486 billion in 2020-21 to $1.947 billion in 2025-26, while non-leather footwear exports climbed from $194 million to $262 million over the same period. Growth, yes — but from a base that remains a fraction of what India’s scale suggests is possible. Closing that gap is precisely what foreign investment and know-how transfer are meant to accelerate.
The invitation was granular, not vague. CLE outlined opportunities for Vietnamese companies to invest in leather and non-leather footwear manufacturing in India, and in the components ecosystem — soles, uppers, moulds, adhesives, accessories and machinery. Technical cooperation was proposed across product engineering, design, workforce training, automation, robotics, artificial intelligence and digital product development. That list reads as a candid admission of where Indian footwear manufacturing most needs upgrading: the process technology and supply-chain precision that Vietnamese factories have mastered serving Nike, Adidas and their peers.
Trade Deals Change the Arithmetic
The pitch leaned heavily on India’s expanding trade architecture — agreements with the UK, EFTA and the European Union — as the export carrot that makes Indian manufacturing newly competitive. That is the real strategic shift. For years, Vietnam’s advantage rested not just on efficiency but on tariff access to Western markets. India’s emerging trade agreements progressively level that field, and Indian negotiators have specifically courted footwear and leather in recent deals. A Vietnamese manufacturer building capacity in India is no longer just accessing a 1.4-billion-person domestic market; it is plugging into preferential routes to Europe and the UK that bypass Vietnam’s own deal gaps.
CLE also showcased India’s institutional support ecosystem — the Central Leather Research Institute (CLRI), the Footwear Design and Development Institute (FDDI), Central Footwear Training Institutes, the National Institute of Fashion Technology and the Leather Sector Skill Council — the infrastructure a foreign investor would rely on for R&D linkage and trained labour. And in a nod to brand differentiation, the council highlighted India’s craft heritage, from Kolhapuri chappals and Rajasthan’s mojaris to Shantiniketan leather bags, positioning artisan skills as an asset for international fashion and luxury collaborations rather than a relic.
BFLEX: The Follow-Up Date
The summit pitch closed with a concrete invitation: the Bharat Footwear and Leather Expo (BFLEX), organised by CLE for March 15–16, 2027 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi — a sourcing event covering footwear, non-leather footwear, leather goods, leather and components.
The Ho Chi Minh City summit will not transform India’s footwear trade overnight. Vietnamese manufacturers have deep, hard-won relationships with Western brands and little reason to abandon them. But the direction is unmistakable: as Vietnam’s own costs rise and its capacity saturates, and as India’s tariff walls come down through successive trade deals, the two industries are converging from opposite directions. CLE has chosen to accelerate that convergence with direct courtship rather than wait for gravity. The smart Vietnamese money — and increasingly, the smart Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese money watching the same arithmetic — will at least take the meeting.
Source: Council for Leather Exports via Leather News
