There is also the headquarters of the biggest juice-maker of Poland - Maspex - and the shoe producer - Badura.

Today Mephisto is a major shoe producer, with more than 2800 employees and 100 million pairs of shoes sold per year.

Bloomberg said Piper, Jaffray & Hopwood had lowered its earnings estimate for the athletic shoe producer.

But in the mid-1950's, when it was bought by Genesco Inc., the Nashville-based shoe producer, it began to lose momentum to competitors like Saks Fifth Avenue.

Salamander, Germany's largest shoe producer, has a $2.2 million investment in a factory near Leningrad that now turns out shoes at the rate of about 5 million pairs a year.

It was one of the many thousands of small shoe producers in Italy.

Nike Joins the Big Board Nike, the athletic shoe producer, which began trading on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, ended unchanged at 26, with 1.03 million shares changing hands.

In over-the-counter trading, Nike, the athletic shoe producer, slid 5 3/8, to 62.

"In West Germany, there are about 230 shoe producers with an average of 130 employees, each producing about 280,000 pairs of shoes a year," Mr. Seitz said.

In Czechoslovakia, one of the first companies expected to be put up for sale is Svit, the state-owned shoe producer that was developed by the Tomas Bata family.