Mentioning the footwear industry in Jinjiang, people naturally think of Chen Dai Town. As a major economic town in Jinjiang, Chen Dai's economic development history can be said to be the epitome of Jinjiang's economy. Chen Dai's development has followed the upstream and downstream expansion of the footwear industry, and now people will think of shoes here as long as they mention Chen Dai, and people will think of Chen Dai in Fujian Province when they think of shoemaking. Experts say the history of Chen Dai's development is a vivid example of benign interaction between the industry, brands and the regional economy.
The start of the shoe industry
Chen Dai town covers an area of 38.4 square kilometers, with 25 administrative villages and a town farm under its jurisdiction.
Chen Dai's development was due to the initiative of some people who dared to be the first to "eat crabs". 1979 spring, Lin Tuqiu and other 14 people each contributed 2,000 yuan to start a clothing, shoes and hats factory, and the products sold very well. County and township party committees to develop timely measures to encourage farmers to use the "three idle" (excess funds, spare room, labor force) to develop side business to get rich. Soon people followed suit, a nail hammer, a table, a pair of scissors, a few household sewing machines, simple plant, simple shoe-making tools, Chen Dai shoe-making industry started.
Chen Dai's shoe factories grew up in imitation and mutual imitation, and Chen Dai people ran to the stores in major cities across the country to buy back and follow the better shoe styles. The number of shoe factories increased year by year, and the scale of shoe factories also expanded. By 1984, there were 700 shoe factories in Chen Dai, making it the first billion-dollar town in Fujian Province.
But due to the low technology and equipment of the shoe factories, the quality of shoes could not be guaranteed, especially the shoes sold to the northern market, where cracks abounded due to the dry air and low temperatures, and a large number of "weekly shoes" and "street shoes" emerged. The shoe industry of Chen Dai Town was once in the doldrums.
At this time, Chen Dai people began to realize the true meaning of enterprise survival and development: "Quality on, Chen Dai Xing; quality under, Chen Dai decline." In 1987, Chen Dai Town raised more than 2 million yuan of self-funding, and the relevant departments jointly organized the country's first footwear and plastic quality inspection institute, and began to carry out strict quality testing of footwear products. Chen Dai began to embark on the road of quality town, the development of enterprises into a new period.
The formation of a block economy
Many experts believe that Chen Dai's greatest success lies in the modular layout of regional industries and the momentum of benign development. Since the mid-to-late 1990s, in order to solve the problem of dispersed development of rural industries, resulting in irrational spatial layout of industries, large discrete industrial structure, waste of land resources and serious environmental pollution, Chen Dai has insisted on highlighting the characteristics of the industry as the main content to enhance the connotation and function of the enterprises here to show a high degree of correlation, forming a typical "block economy", presenting modularization, and the formation of a block economy. economy", showing a modular production pattern. Although most of the enterprises in the cluster are small in size, there are thousands of similar enterprises clustered together to form a large total scale and a high market share.
At the same time, a close division of labor has been created among the enterprises in the town, and the production of products is divided and coordinated according to the value chain, with different parts of the value-added of a product being completed by different enterprises individually, i.e., from the raw materials, production, assembly, and sales processes and the intermediate parts of each of these processes are mostly completed by different enterprises. In Chen Dai, some enterprises specialize in the production of plastic shoes, sandals and tourist shoes; some enterprises specialize in the production of shoe lasts, buckles, soles, laces, linings, heels and even shoeboxes, etc.; and all the raw and auxiliary materials required for the processing and production of shoes, such as shoe machines, shoe samples, chemical rubbers, hardware fittings and outsoles, etc., are also conveniently available here.
Within the town, various types of business organizations such as artisanal workshops, small proprietorships, virtual businesses, integrated large-scale enterprises selling products to end-users and outsourcing companies, as well as service organizations providing information and market support to regional industries, all survive and thrive. Each enterprise bases itself on its own resources and chooses the production link in the value chain of product production that can best give play to its own strengths, so as to achieve a reasonable regional division of labor and maximize its benefits, and keep the regional industry in Chen Dai competitively vibrant for a long time.
From relying on foreign resources to set up shoe factories to having a complete industrial chain of shoe-making industry clusters, Chen Dai Town has created a series of numerical myths. 2003 Chen Dai's industrial and agricultural gross output value reached 10.85 billion yuan, with 420 million yuan of tax revenues and 8,292 yuan of per capita net income for farmers.
At the same time, Chen Dai's enterprises also have 7 Chinese well-known trademarks, 3 Chinese famous brand products, 7 famous brand products in Fujian Province, and 21 famous trademarks in Fujian Province. The products of 11 of these enterprises have been granted national inspection-free status.
Specialized market pull
Chen Dai's success on the other hand comes from the pull of the specialized market. As most enterprises did not have the strength to build a marketing network in the early days, they had to rely on relatively centralized trading markets, so a number of professional markets were formed around each industrial cluster. The prosperity of specialized markets in turn spawned new enterprises, accelerating the formation of industrial clusters in the interaction between production and markets. Chen Dai people can now proudly say that the Chen Dai Shoes Material Market, which integrates the wholesale, retail, storage and transportation of raw and auxiliary materials for the footwear industry, as well as the exhibition and sale of shoe machines, has grown up. Statistics show that Chen Dai Shoes Market has attracted merchants from all over the country as well as from more than 30 countries and regions such as South Korea, Italy, Australia, Argentina, etc., with an annual turnover of more than 4 billion yuan, making it one of the largest shoes markets in East China. At present, a piece of planning land area of 200,000 square meters, with a total investment of 300 million yuan, display, trade, information technology exchanges as one of the Jinjiang Footwear Market has also appeared in the prosperous area of Chenli.
Entering the new century, many people come to Chen Dai to ask the question, Chen Dai will have greater development? Chen Dai Town, the person in charge of the answer is, here is from the enterprise "to feel their way forward" to "government guidance, enterprise planning and development" stage. At present, Chen Dai Town is implementing the "grasp the big, support the excellent, with small" strategy to guide the enterprise strong combination, while also supporting the development of intermediary, labor, transportation, information and other tertiary industries, to grow the scale of industry, optimize the industrial structure.
Chen Dai's tomorrow, we believe it will be better.