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Domestic goods still out of favour with Vietnamese consumers
Vietnam-made goods are being threatened by low-cost, low-quality, unsafe goods. This was heard at a workshop on Vietnamese consumers and Vietnam-made goods on July 30 in Da Nang city.
2/3 of consumers favour imports
Dr. Dinh Thi My Loan, Deputy Chairman of the Vietnam Retailers’ Association, cited the latest statistics released by a market survey firm that 77 percent of Vietnamese consumers favour foreign products, while the average figure is just 40 percent in Asia.
Loan said she conducted a small survey on why Vietnamese consumers do not use Vietnam-made goods and she received different answers. Some people said that it is now not easy to find Vietnam-made goods on the market, while China-made goods are available everywhere and dirt cheap. Meanwhile, sellers are focusing on advertising imported products, not Vietnamese products.
“Who will purchase Vietnam-made goods, if even Vietnamese retailers do not advertise Vietnam-made goods?” she questioned.
Foreign goods are now elbowing domestic goods out not only at big trade centres but at traditional markets as well. A survey at Dong Xuan wholesale market in Hanoi showed that domestic goods just account for 20 percent of household goods, souvenirs and fine art products, while the figure is 40 percent for consumer goods.
Vietnam is a big fruit- and vegetable-growing country, but it still spent $75 million to import fruit in the first six months of the year.
Loan warned that if Vietnam does not reorganise its distribution system to make it more reasonable and methodical, and if it does not call on Vietnamese consumers to use Vietnam-made goods, the goods will fail to cement positions in the home market.
Dr Ho Tat Thang, Deputy Chairman of the Association for Product Quality and Consumer Protection (Vinatas), believes that Vietnam has set excessively easy conditions for imports, allowing them to attack domestically-made goods.
National problem still has no national policy
Nguyen Manh Hung, former Deputy Head of the Market Control Agency, described illegal imports as a ‘restive horse’ which Vietnam cannot rein in.
Though domestic producers have been trying to reduce production costs, they still cannot compete with illegal imports which are cheap because of tax evasion, and thus are favoured by the majority of consumers with low incomes.
Hung said that illegal imports are a national problem, but no national policy has been set up to solve it.
“We should not prevent legal and high-quality imports from entering Vietnam, but we need to boycott illegal and low-quality imports because of the risks and bad consequences they can bring,” Hung said.
According to Dr Vu Van Dien, Deputy General Director of the General Department for Standards, Measuring and Quality, only 35 percent of Vietnam’s standards are now equal to international standards, while Vietnam has had to remove 1,000 out of date standards.
Many economists have said that if competing fairly, Vietnam made goods are not inferior to foreign made products in quality. However, Vietnamese producers will be surely defeated by illegal imports, which do not undergo strict control in food safety and quality.
vietnamnet, tp
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