Shoemaking news:Reviving  Local Shoe Industry in Nigeria,about the shoemaking machinery and the shoemaking technology.

interview

Talk about shoes and anything pertaining to the shoe industry and Pius Otsu, General Manager, Lennards Nigeria Plc, would tell you all there is to know in the business from scratch to the end.

In this interview with REPORTER, Ekene Okoro, Otsu x-rays the shoe industry in Nigeria, the challenges it presently faces, the way forward and how Lennards intends to use its 55 years of experience in the industry to make Nigerians patronise more home-made shoes than foreign ones and other issues. Excerpts:

The shoe industry in Nigeria is a large one, what size of it does Lennards possess?

The size of Lennards' market in Nigeria is very large. At the peak we had about 47 branches and network around the nation, but somewhere along the line, because of the downtrend of activities, we stripped to about 16 branches but again we are now waking up to most of the areas where we earlier closed our branches. We are going back to Kaduna, we are opening up Ibadan and also Benin, we already have a branch in Sokoto, Jos, Port Harcourt, Enugu and some other states in the Federation. In Lagos, we have about four branches. So we are opening up all over again and we are not leaving out the West Coast.