Up to now, the footwear industry in Vietnam is currently ranked second in the Asian market, led by China and third in India. On the world market in general, with total export turnover of $13 billion in 2016, Vietnam is now the third largest exporter of footwear after China and Italy.

In the period 2010-2016, the years of the world economy and the country are facing difficulties due to the crisis, exports of footwear industry is always growing. In recent years, Europe, America and Japan are still the main export markets of Vietnamese leather and footwear industry.

As of June 2017, the Vietnamese footwear industry has had over 70% of the world footwear market. This is a great opportunity for the Vietnamese footwear industry in the coming time. It is forecasted that production and export of the industry in 2017 will have a higher growth rate than 2016. In particular, industrial production index can reach about 5%, export turnover of the industry is close $18 billion, up over 10% over the same period of last year. Meanwhile, China continues to focus on higher technology sectors instead of investing in textiles and footwear, so it is likely that some footwear orders will move from China to Vietnam.

In addition, footwear producers in Vietnam will also take advantage of the opportunities offered by the Vietnam-Europe Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in 2018 and previously signed agreements such as the Strategic European Agreement The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (TPP), the Asia-Europe Economic Co-operation Agreement, the Vietnam-Korea Bilateral Trade Agreement, etc, to boost exports of footwear to the countries of the world. Moreover, the golden population structure is a good opportunity for the development of the footwear industry in the coming time. At the same time, the political stability, low labor cost and competitiveness of export policies are also favorable for the Vietnam footwear industry.

Together with that, the domestic footwear enterprises continuously innovate their production models, participate in local, regional and global footwear production chains as well as try to innovate and modernize their equipment, machinery and expansion of production scale to increase productivity and quality of export products.

However, beside the opportunities and curent challenges of the domestic footwear industry, the quality of products of some enterprises has not met the requirements of export. The level of technology, labor force for the footwear industry is still limited. Planning raw material areas for the production of raw materials for the leather and footwear industry such as raw leather, cotton, artificial fibers and chemicals are still lacking. At the same time, most of the enterprises are small and medium-sized footwear workshops, lack of capital, lack of technology, poor quality human resources, lack of initiative in supporting industries, and low productivity.

As a result, local footwear enterprises have to rise up, change their forms of production, invest in equipment innovation and actively integrate into the global supply chain. In order to be able to grow and develop sustainably in line with policies to support exports, the footwear sector needs to have development policies towards developing the domestic market and weak supporting industries.

In general, Vietnam is trying to create favorable conditions and environment for local footwear businesses, and attract foreign investment in the production of raw materials and products for export to become the world's number one exporter of footwear in the coming years.