Vietnam sets ambitious goal for textiles and garments

The Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association (Vitas) yesterday announced the strategy on the textile and garment industry, which targets $10-12bil worth of apparel product exports by 2010.

According to Vitas, there are 2,000 operational textile and garment enterprises, 0.5% of which are State owned, 25%, foreign invested, and the remaining, private owned or joint stock companies.

Vietnamese companies can make 10,000 tonnes of fibre a year, meeting 5% of the demand, and 50,000 tonnes of general fibre (30% of demand).

In terms of export ability, Mr Le Quoc An, Chairman of Vitas, said that exports had been increasing by 20% per annum in recent years. In 2006, total export turnover reached $5,834bil, 15% of total export turnover, representing a 20.5% growth rate compared to 2005. The US remains the biggest export market for Vietnam, consuming 55% of exports, followed by the EU with $1,243bil in turnover (20%), and Japan ($628mil and 11%). Vitas’ report showed that the domestic market just consumes 7% of the total retail turnover, estimated at $1.8bil.

Up to now, Vietnam’s textile and garment industry has been relying heavily on imports, as 95% of the demand for cotton fibre and 70% of the demand for general fibre must be fed by imports.

Mr An said that another big problem of Vietnam’s textile and garment industry is that there was no close process of industrial production, from upstream production (input materials) to designing, making finished products on industrial scale, and distribution and building trademarks. Most export products have been sold to big foreign traders, but the traders do not share risks with Vietnamese enterprises in legal disputes.

Mr An said that Vitas had set an ambitious goal for the textile and garment industry by 2010, under which the total turnover would reach $15bil, and the export turnover, $10-12bil. In order to reach that end, the industry needs to raise the locally made content in products to 50%, and increase the added value in products by 50%.

Mr An has announced that eight key programmes aiming to develop the textile and garment industry will be launched from now to 2010. These include ones focusing on raising the input material production capacity and setting up fashion centres nationwide.

Source: VNE