A Bulawayo shoe manufacturer, Millenium Footwear is reportedly facing a myriad of challenges, the major one being the scarce availability of foreign currency. Millenium Footwear manufactures shoes from exotic leathers, which include elephant, crocodile, ostrich, buffalo and giraffe skins. In an interview with Newsday, the Company’s director Stuart Simali revealed that the industry is in dire straits. He said
It is in a bad shape. The biggest problem is currency related. Some of our suppliers will accept payment through real-time gross settlement (RTGS) transfers, but others are demanding to be paid in hard currency.
To make a shoe you need 20 components and out of these, about half of the suppliers want payment in foreign currency… This causes problems for us such as how do I cost my shoes, locally and for the export market?… It has become very hard because we sell our products with RTGS. The result is we have a huge backlog, plenty of orders that we cannot fulfil because of foreign currency challenges.
We also need the forex for machinery spares and consumables and have applied for forex like other companies, but we don’t know if we will get it… We are now concerned with losing time looking for raw materials and that waiting period pushes the cost of production very high. Once the cost of production shoots up, then you become uncompetitive in the export market.
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