ABSTRACT
Dongguan, a city of some 7 million people situated about 56 miles (90 kilometers) north of Hong Kong, is China’s footwear capital, exporting 600 million pairs of shoes per year. It is rather unexpected that we would find here a thriving community of Brazilians, estimated to number three thousand, who mostly work in the footwear industry. These Brazilians trace their roots to southern Brazil, which was the center of the shoe export business until the early 1990s. At that time, a reduction in Brazil’s trade barriers, an appreciating currency, and pressure from cheap Chinese labor caused the exports to decline. The surviving firms moved north, to the parts of Brazil where labor costs were cheaper. Chinese firms continued to undermine the Brazilian producers at the lower end of the market thanks to an abundance of cheap labor, but they lacked the knowledge and craftsmanship needed to make fancier shoes. This encouraged a slow migration of skilled Brazilian shoemakers, some with advanced training in tanning, to seek business in China with Chinese companies. Ricardo Correa is the owner of Paramont Asia, which sold more than 35 million pairs of ladies’ shoes in 2007. Influenced by the combination of price pressures in Brazil and a shortage of skills in China, Correa migrated to China in 1995. His firm now takes design specifications for shoes from its customers and then manages product development and quality control in factories in China. Most of the manufactured shoes are then exported to America. Of Paramont’s eight hundred employees, one hundred are Brazilian, and day-to-day business is conducted in English.
