A few figures about Micam and Mipel: 45,424 visitors (lots of Chinese) showed up at the footwear fair, 13,000 at the leather goods exhibition

Let’s have a look at a few figures about Micam and Mipel, which concluded yesterday. Let’s begin with footwear. 45,424 visitors, of whom 27,272 coming from foreign countries and 18,152 from Italy, showed up at Micam 86^th edition. Attendance of visitors has been in line with September 2017 edition, and number has gone up, +2,7%, compared to February 2018. As regards international visitors, Chinese remarkably increased, as well as clients coming from Hong Kong, +68,6% on the whole together, then visitors coming from North America (+43,2%). In Europe, good numbers for Spain (+9,6%), Portugal and Switzerland. Conversely, France, Germany, Russia and CSI area have been decreasing. “Micam keeps being an event strongly oriented towards international business. Aiming to hold such leadership, we asked deputy Prime Minister Di Maio, who turned up at the fair, to allocate as many resources as possible in favour of small and medium-sized enterprises and employment, in order to reduce tax wedge”, points out Annarita Pilotti, president of Assocalzaturifici (the association of footwear manufacturers). “Moreover, it is of paramount importance to remove restrictions imposed to Russia, as they negatively affect the attendance of Russian buyers. Ultimately, it is extremely urgent to create a common European regulation about origin labelling, to be compulsory, in order to safeguard manufacturing production top quality”. Let’s move on to leather goods. Mipel 114^th edition, remark organizers, “has been the best ever: in fact, both exhibitors and visitors have been increasing”, therefore amounting to 13,000 in total, a higher number compared to February 2018 and September 2017, with “peak records in the first two days of the exhibition”. We noticed a considerable attendance of visitors coming from Japan, South Korea, China, Russia and Ukraine. Likewise, we came across a lot of visitors from the United States, Australia and Portugal. Germans dropped conversely. Italians have been steady. According to Danny D’Alessandro, general manager of Mipel and Assopellettieri (the association of leather goods manufacturers), “we are expanding and reinforcing our major role, internationally acknowledged. Mipel is a platform for the leather goods manufacturing system, as it represents a valid example of a working country that wants to win its international competition. We are open to the future and innovation. We ask our companies to trust in our proposals”.