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Aug 27, 2014 @ 05:00 PM 3,465 views

Bangladesh's Footwear Industry Is Making

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Naazneen Karmali ,
Forbes Staff
I write about India's wealth creators.
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I am the India Editor of Forbes Asia and Mumbai bureau manager of Forbes. Earlier, I was
managing editor of Business India, among India's leading business magazines. I'm also a

founding director of SatyaGyan Foundation, a non-profit that aims to alleviate poverty through
education and employment.
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This story appears in the September 2014 issue of Forbes Asia.
Blue Ocean Footwears four-story factory, designed by noted Bangladeshi architect Bashirul
Haq, an expert on building safety standards, is located close to Apexs factory site in Gazipur. It
has 4,000 people producing close to 2 million pairs of womens shoes annually for customers
like Esprit and Germanys Tamaris. The workers are supervised by a team of 65 Chinese
technicians who stay on the factory campus but dont speak either English or Bengali.
Instead, Bangladeshi workers are being taught basic Chinese, says Sam Yu, Blue Oceans
managing director. Yu, who has been assigned to the joint venture by Green Land, says the
company looked at Indonesia, Cambodia and Laos before settling on Bangladesh as an
outsourcing base. While labor is cheap, other costs, notably that of land, are higher than
elsewhere. Manufacturing shoes in Bangladesh is not about lowest costs.
Blue Ocean Footwears factory on Dhakas outskirts
Still, the success of the partnership has spurred Green Land to close a factory in Vietnam and
scale up here instead. A long with Apex, it plans to build a bigger factory that will have 5,000
workers producing 3.5 million pairs of shoes annually.
Other foreign companies have come, notably to the south e astern port city of Chittagong that is
emerging as a shoemaking hub. Taiwans Zhon g shan Glory has a factory producing Timberland
shoes. Two other factories produce footwear for Armani and Hugo Boss .
South Koreas Youngone, a maker of outdoor shoes and sportswear, owns the Korean Export
Processing Zone that sits on a 2,500 a cre site. While the project is still awaiting key clearances
from the government, the zones president, Jahangir Saadat, says that the first investment is for a
shoe factory that aims to be the largest in the region, producing 32 million pairs annually. N.K.