Good news from leather goods. In the first six months of 2019, revenues coming from French tanning industry increased by 9.1% on annual basis. Bags have been driving such positive accomplishment, despite a difficult scenario: as reported by the Conseil Nationale du Cuir (the National Leather Council), France’s leather goods manufacturers also augmented their turnover, which went up by 8.6%. Considering production investments, recently carried out in the industry, this is not much of surprise.
A difficult economic situation
Nevertheless, in the six-month-period France’s leather business has been going through a number of problems. In fact, manufacturing of finished leather has decreased in all its segments (bovine -1.5%, sheep -5.3%, goat -8.9%), with the only exception of calfskin (+4.2%). Overall imports increased by 5%, while exports dropped by 7%. Ahead of leather tanning, raw material business is in trouble as well: in fact, in the period provisions have been slowing down (only calves and goats are running steady) so much so that imports rose by 4%, whereas exports declined considerably, as they slumped by 33%.
The product
As we said, leather goods are doing great in terms of revenues. Yet, at the same time, CNC (which recently arranged a meeting to discuss about sustainability) stressed the fact that production of women’s bags (with regard to all materials) has been decreasing: -8.8%. As regards footwear, from January until June its business trend turned out to be negative in all performance segments: in fact, value dropped by 7.6% as much as manufacturing volumes (-5.7%). Only the average retail price has gone up.
Picture taken from CNC website
