|
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Carcar’s shoe industry fears China, free trade
By Aurelia l. Castro
Sun.Star Staff Reporter
A local footwear manufacturer is worried about losing a bigger share of the market due to the influx of cheaper foreign footwear.
“With cheaper shoes from China, we are now having difficulty. In fact, our sales went down 50 percent,” Nick Salazar, proprietor of Niekie Footwear in Carcar, Cebu said in an interview.
Salazar attended the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Non-Agricultural Market Access industry briefing and consultation meeting organized by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the Board of Investments (BOI) at Montebello Hotel last Thursday.
“It’s a fact that products imported from China are cheap because of low cost of production (there). What the government can do is to look for and create programs to help our local industry become competitive and productive,” Erlinda Arcellana, director of BOI industrial policy office, said during the open forum.
Arcellana was one of the country’s representatives during the 6th WTO Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong.
Difficulties
She said the government is aware of the difficulties that hound the footwear industry in the country.
“We are working on increasing the tariff on footwear. But it’s not really the tariff issue (that is causing the) difficulty but the smuggling of undervalued footwear from China,” she said.
Monitoring and vigilance by the industry itself are needed to help stop smuggling, she said.
“As a nation composed of many islands, we have many ports of entry in our country and it becomes difficult to control the surge of smuggled goods. But the Bureau of Customs is working to eliminate this problem,” she said.
Salazar also expressed concern about losing his firm’s market share as an effect of the WTO’s thrust for trade liberalization.
But Marilou Mendoza of the Tariff Commission said there would be safety measures that will protect the local industry.
Product dumping is considered an “unfair trade practice”, she said.
Import surges
“If there are import surges that are injurious to our local industry, we can apply (safety) measures to protect our local industry from being affected by that certain import,” she said.
Salazar said Niekie once exported their products to a store in Singapore. However, when his buyer in Singapore found the same products to be cheaper in China, he lost the contract.
“Now we can no longer export because we could not find a market due to our uncompetitive pricing,” he said.
At present, he said Niekie concentrates on penetrating the local market in Cebu and Mindanao.
Because of the cost of production in the country is high, Salazar told Sun.Star Cebu that there are Carcar footwear stores that now have their products manufactured in China.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (March 18, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here. |
|
[return to top]
[home]
[network page]
|
LOCAL NEWS
BUSINESS
OPINION
SPORTS
LIFESTYLE
FEATURE
SUPERBALITA
WEEKEND
|
