But it looks like Czech customers are beginning to be more interested in quality than simply the price tag. In the period we are speaking about, the beginning of the 1990's, many new shoe companies began appearing on the scene. In 1990, when the state-owned firm was transformed into a limited company, six separate independent companies were carved out of the original giant. The parentcompany was also renamed. Nov Svit Group now accounts for about 25 per cent of total shoe production in the Czech Republic.
Annual production runs to about seven million pairs of shoes.
But at present the production of shoes is running at a loss. For the present, Svit is not making any plans to capitalize them. Soon after it was hived off from the state-owned Svit Zl n, the Toeb e company BOPO began to go downhill. And with the decline in output, the number of employees fell. Of course we made a lot of bad mistakes, but in the end five private Russian firms passed the test, and today they're very good, solid partners.