On August 20th, China Leather published the results of an ILM survey on global tanners' business confidence in 2025. Participating companies spanned a wide range of sectors, including shoe upper leather companies (70%), leather products companies (54%), and automotive/aviation/marine leather companies (35%). Other companies included furniture and interior furnishing leather, apparel, and glove leather.
The results revealed significant operating pressures across the tanning industry in 2025. No respondents believed sales and turnover would perform extremely well that year. Half of the companies struggled to maintain operations, and over 30% faced poor sales and turnover.
The core concerns of these companies centered around insufficient consumer demand for leather, declining orders, rising costs, and the global economic downturn. These concerns were exacerbated by multiple factors: labor shortages, volatile raw material prices, and geopolitical events. Trade policy (such as tariffs) was cited as one of the industry's top concerns, with a high frequency of mentions. This emerging risk is expected to continue to impact industry development. Market expectations indicate that companies' confidence in finished leather prices and orders over the next six months continues to weaken. The proportion of companies predicting price and order declines has increased significantly compared to 2024, indicating that the current downward market trend has become a reality and is expected to continue until 2026.
In the raw materials sector, demand for high-quality raw hides remains undiminished, but the raw hide market faces significant challenges, with raw material quality issues becoming increasingly serious. Tanners need to educate consumers about the value of leather, while also calling for improvements in raw material quality control systems, both at the source and through policy.
In terms of sustainable development, while the leather industry is trending toward biodegradable leather, this trend is unlikely to become mainstream in the short term due to low tannery profits, heightened cost concerns, and the technical challenges of producing fully biodegradable leather.
