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Lovemore Zigara, Midlands Correspondent
THE country’s biggest shoe manufacturer, Bata Shoe Company, says it will halt the refurbishment and modernisation of retail outlets across the country to evaluate its successes.

Bata has so far modernised about nine shops, among them retail outlets in Harare, Gweru, Kwekwe and Masvingo.

The process started in 2012 with the refurbishment of the Leopold Takawira branch in Harare in line with the company’s endeavour to conform to international standards.

Ahm Ehsanuzzaman, the Bata managing director, told Chronicle Business that refurbishment of other shops would be determined by the outcome of the evaluation exercise.

“We’re now evaluating and at the moment I won’t be able to give you the number of retail outlets we’re going to evaluate this year.

The shops that we refurbished were part of a pilot project and we’re evaluating the exercise and any expansion will be based on our evaluation,” Ehsanuzzaman said.

He said in the short term the company is focusing on competitiveness for it to compete with imports, mainly from Asia, which have affected the local footwear industry.

“The only way we can compete against cheap footwear from outside the country is through producing quality, but affordable products and we’re doing this by re-introducing some of our brands that we had stopped producing.

“We’re re-introducing the Pata Pata and Sandak brands, which we believe are of high quality and can compete with the cheap footwear coming into the country.

“We’ve contracted one of our associated business units to manufacture Pata Pata while Sandak will be manufactured at our plant in Gweru,” Ehsanuzzaman said.

He said the re-introduction of the two products will see the company increasing the volume of shoes it produces from about two million annually to over 2, 5 million.

The re-introduction of the two brands has also seen capacity utilisation at the Gweru plant soaring to 95 percent.