Portugal was the world’s 13th-largest footwear exporter by value in 2025 and its 18th-largest producer, according to the World Footwear Yearbook 2026 released on 13 September by the industry association APICCAPS, timed to the Micam, Lineapelle and Simac fairs in Milan, where more than 70 Portuguese companies are exhibiting this week. The headline is resilience rather than growth: exports edged up 0.8% to €1.718 billion last year after two years of decline, then slipped 2.1% to €813 million in the first half of 2026. NorthSouth HQ has put the association’s figures next to a source it does not use — the customs statistics of Denmark, Sweden and Norway — and the result is the most useful number in this story: in 2026 all three Scandinavian markets are buying more Portuguese footwear, with Denmark up 12.4%, at a time when Portugal’s shoe exports as a whole are falling.
The yearbook’s global tables first. Portugal made 74 million pairs in 2025, 0.3% of world output by volume and 0.5% by value, which keeps it second in Europe and widens the gap over Spain, which produced 60 million pairs. Around 93% of Portuguese production is exported, to 174 markets; 69 million pairs went abroad in 2025 (17th in the world by quantity), worth $1.949 billion (13th by value). The average export price rose 2.5% to $28.25 a pair, second only to Italy, and 58% of the pairs exported were leather shoes — the specialisation that explains why Portugal sits far higher in the value ranking than in the volume ranking.
A value exporter in a volume industry
Germany took 24% of Portuguese footwear exports in 2025, France 20%, the Netherlands and Spain 11% each and the United Kingdom 6%. The Nordic countries do not appear in that top five, and APICCAPS did not publish a Scandinavian breakdown, so NorthSouth HQ pulled the mirror data instead: Statistics Denmark’s SITC trade table, Statistics Sweden’s Combined-Nomenclature import table and Statistics Norway’s table 08806, each filtered to imports from Portugal in the footwear chapter (SITC 85 or CN 64). Import statistics are recorded on a different basis from Portugal’s export figures — they include freight and insurance, and each office attributes trade to partner countries by its own rule — so the numbers below describe what the three markets record buying, not what INE records Portugal selling.
On that basis the three Scandinavian countries imported footwear from Portugal worth about €103 million in 2025: Denmark DKK 495.8 million (roughly €66 million at the year’s average exchange rate), Norway NOK 242.9 million (about €21 million) and Sweden SEK 179.2 million (about €16 million). Set against APICCAPS’s €1.718 billion of exports, that is close to 6% — in other words, Scandinavia is roughly a United Kingdom-sized market for Portuguese shoes, spread across three countries and three currencies, and it is missing from the association’s league table only because it is split.
Three statistics offices, one missing market
The 2025 picture was worse in Scandinavia than in the world at large. In euro terms the three markets bought about €115 million of Portuguese footwear in 2024 and €103 million in 2025, a fall of roughly a tenth in a year when Portugal’s global footwear exports grew 0.8%. Norway shows the longest slide: its imports of Portuguese footwear fell from NOK 361.5 million in 2022 to NOK 333.1 million in 2023, NOK 290.6 million in 2024 and NOK 242.9 million in 2025, a third of the value gone in three years, over a period in which the krone lost ground against the euro. Denmark went from DKK 552.8 million to DKK 495.8 million, and Sweden from SEK 184.3 million to SEK 179.2 million.
Then the direction changed. Statistics Denmark’s monthly series, published on 8 September and running to July, puts Danish imports of Portuguese footwear at DKK 327.3 million for January–July 2026, up 12.4% from DKK 291.2 million a year earlier, with June (DKK 61.0 million against 47.4 million) and July (DKK 64.2 million against 60.5 million) both ahead of 2025. Footwear is now 15.6% of everything Denmark imports from Portugal — DKK 2.10 billion in the seven months, itself up 5.0% — and the second-largest single line after clothing (DKK 408.9 million, up 26.7%). Statistics Norway’s August data, released this morning, show footwear imports from Portugal of NOK 166.1 million for January–August, up 2.8%, with August alone at NOK 32.5 million against NOK 28.6 million, a 13.6% rise. Statistics Sweden’s table, which runs to June, records SEK 61.3 million for the first half, up 1.8%; the Swedish series is heavily back-loaded, with September and October 2025 (SEK 26.9 million and 25.3 million) each worth more than double a typical spring month, so the autumn boot season will decide Sweden’s year.
2025 was worse in Scandinavia than elsewhere; 2026 is better
Two structural features of the Scandinavian market explain both the size and the resilience. The first is that the largest Danish buyer of Portuguese footwear is a Danish manufacturer: ECCO has run a factory in São João de Ver, Santa Maria da Feira, since 1984, its first plant outside Denmark and today one of the largest footwear producers in Portugal, so part of Denmark’s DKK 496 million is intra-company traffic between an Aveiro-district plant and a Bredebro-headquartered group. The second is the design-in-Scandinavia, make-in-Portugal model that NorthSouth HQ has documented brand by brand in its directory: Angulus of Copenhagen, which has produced all its shoes in Portugal since 2020; Ten Points of Ängelholm, made in Portugal since 1983; Gothenburg’s Sneaky Steve and Oslo’s New Movements, both made in Felgueiras; Axel Arigato, whose sneakers come out of Porto-area family factories, and Stockholm’s C.QP, made at a Portuguese sneaker specialist; and Garment Project of Copenhagen. These brands do not chase the cheapest pair, which is why the Scandinavian order book has held up while APICCAPS reports Chinese footwear exports down 10.9%, Brazil’s down 15.7% and Turkey’s down 5.3% in the first five months of 2026.
Portugal’s own exporters into the region follow the same logic from the other side: Guimarães-based Kyaia, whose Fly London brand runs its own stores in Denmark; Procalçado’s vegan Lemon Jelly line through Malmö-based Boozt; Pombal’s Dikamar in safety footwear; and Oliveira de Azeméis contract makers such as PC Footwear, which shipped a custom stage collection to a Swedish artist in July. All are profiled in the PT → Nordics directory.
Why the Nordic order book holds
APICCAPS’s executive director, Paulo Gonçalves, framed the yearbook bluntly: the Portuguese industry “is going through a very difficult period, common to most of the world’s big producers”, but has “managed to resist better than many of its competitors and to preserve an international position based on value, quality and responsiveness”. The 2.1% first-half decline, he argued, “must be seen in the context of a general slowdown in global footwear trade”: Italy’s exports were down 4.3% and Spain’s 7.3% through May, and among the big producers the association names only Vietnam, at minus 1.3%, is holding up better than Portugal.
For the corridor the reading is straightforward. Scandinavia is a €100-million-a-year footwear customer that Portugal’s own trade statistics never show as a bloc, it buys at the leather-and-design end of the range where the $28.25 average price is earned, and in 2026 it is one of the few places where the order book is growing. The next data points are Statistics Sweden’s July–August figures at the end of September, which will show whether the Swedish autumn season has started, Statistics Denmark’s August release in early October, and APICCAPS’s full-year export tables early in 2027, by which time the question is whether the Nordic recovery survives a global market that is still shrinking.