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City supports businesses to renew technologies
Ho Chi Minh City is embarking on a project that will help 900 small and medium-sized enterprises in industrial and export processing zones to renew their technologies in the 2009-2010 period.
Phan Minh Tan, Director of the municipal Science and Technology Department, which is the main project developer, said this project has set to form a science and technology market and outline comprehensive solutions, ranging from administrative reforms to financial and technical assistance, for all types of businesses.
Initially, enterprises operating in the city’s prioritised industries, including mechanical engineering, electronics-information technology, pharmaceutical chemistry, and food processing, will receive 50-100 percent interest rate subsidy for loans used for technology renewal.
“The electronics-IT, pharmaceutical chemistry and food processing industries must achieve a technology renewal rate of 15 percent a year while the mechanical engineering industry must increase its production capacity to meet both local and export demands,” Tan said.
The project will provide target businesses with information and consultancy on technology transfer solutions, assistance in exercising intellectual property rights and organisong exhibitions and technology promotion propgrammes. It will also help them to access the 50 billion VND technology and science development fund, and finance their consultancy, survey and technology transfer costs.
A survey conducted among 400 businesses in the city in late 2008 revealed that only 1 percent of businesses have applied advanced technology while 51 percent still used out-of-date technologies.
In the Tan Thuan Export Processing Zone, up to 61 percent of businesses are using backward technologies though most of them are foreign-invested ones./.
Vietnamplus
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