Trade dispute could create problems as well as opportunities for Vietnam
03/09/2019
In comments to local press, Diep Thanh Kiet said it would take 10 years to double its capacity, which is around 1 billion pairs per year.
He said: "Vietnam’s footwear industry exports 460 million pairs of shoes to the US annually, and if the exports suddenly surge, the risk of attracting anti-dumping tariffs is very large."
Almost 70% of shoes imported into the US are from China.
Rick Helfenbein, CEO of the American Apparel and Footwear Association, told news channel CNBC that the short term will be “ugly”.
“We don’t have a place to go. You can’t move this mountain of merchandise so quickly. The message from the administration is, ‘Get out of China'. The problem is we can’t do it as fast as they would like us to do it. So we are going to stay there and fight it out.”
On September 1, the US and China began imposing new tariffs on an additional list of products, including many types of footwear and gloves. These tariffs are in addition to those imposed on previous lists of imports and exports since the dispute began at the start of 2018.
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