Milan, 7th June 2012. Fiera Milano (Milan Trade Fair) is to partner up with ANCI (the National Association of Italian Footwear Manufacturers) and enter the Chinese market. An agreement to that effect was signed today at the Association’s annual assembly in Milan by the ANCI president Cleto Sagripanti, the vice president Gimmi Baldinini and the commercial and international director of Fiera Milano Roberto Foresti.
As Cleto Sagripanti stated in his report to the Assembly, Italian exports of medium to high-end footwear performed excellently in 2011 and the China/Hong Kong aggregate is now the seventh target market worldwide, its value having more than doubled in the last three years. This is the setting for the agreement with Fiera Milano, which in turn is part of the larger project MICAM nel Mondo (MICAM around the World).
Through this international event ANCI aims to export the MICAM ShoEvent(a major international fair which takes place twice a year at Fiera Milano) and strengthen the footwear trade fair on a global scale by taking the strengths of the Milan event and interpreting and developing them on major foreign markets. The project will be launched in China and will then head to other countries where demand for Italian products is high, such as the United States and Japan.
“We are proud that ANCI has chosen to partner up with Fiera Milano and create a tool for developing and expanding Italian footwear businesses in China”, says Roberto Foresti. “The world is changing rapidly and all forecasts indicate that in the mid to long term the ranking of the richest countries will be entirely different to how we knew it up until a few years ago - by overall GDP but also by income per capita. Fiera Milano is ready to face this new situation. We have four solid trade fair platforms in China, Brazil, India and Russia and are about to launch a fifth in Singapore. We also have operations in other parts of the world such as South Africa, Turkey and the United States. We are glad to provide ANCI with our know-how and the structure in China and we hope that this will be the first in a long series of agreements that our country can and must make so that companies may continue to grow in those sectors where we still lead”.
“MICAM nel Mondo is one step further towards creating and developing a strategy that the Association has been carrying out for years with overseas events that gather support and involve large participation in major international markets”, stated the ANCI president Cleto Sagripanti. “With this approach, ANCI is a firm believer in optimising the resources of the national economic system that are dedicated to internationalisation, by co-coordinating the various parties involved. These include trade fairs, the Agency for promotion and internationalisation for business consulting, the Chambers of Commerce and industrial associations. The partnership with Fiera Milano will allow us to export a winning formula like the MICAM ShoEvent to some of the footwear industry’s most important overseas markets, through continual consultation, cooperation and an exchange of best practises and with the ultimate aim of making the very most of outstanding Italian production”.
