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As demand for luxury grows, can VN’s fixture makers grow with it?
Vietnamese bathroom faucet and fixture manufacturers make high quality products, but not yet for the domestic market. Instead, Vietnamese designers are choosing foreign brands for their upscale clients.
High quality - for export only
Do Duc Duy, Chief Representative of the southern branch of Viglacera, a famous name brand in Vietnamese bath fixtures, explained: “We focus on medium-class products with reasonable prices. Viglacera is also making high-class products, but only for export.”
Duy added that his corporation uses new technologies, but only in its export products.
Thu Hanh, owner of a bathroom faucet and fixtures shop on Ly Thuong Kiet street in HCM City, has been selling bathroom products for 20 years. She maintains that products with foreign brand names have better designs and high quality as well as good advertising campaigns.
Dung, who has been a bathroom faucet and fixtures distributor for decades, said that Vietnamese-made products barely survive in the low- and medium-class market. Competition is very stiff as Vietnamese-made products must compete with products of unclear origin and questionable quality.
He noted that consumers now consider bathroom faucets and fixtures as part of interior decoration. They tend to choose fashionable products.
“Meanwhile, the products we Vietnamese make just have basic functions and are not considered to be for interior decoration. This is the weak point of Vietnam’s products. The weaknesses of domestic businesses are in development and business strategy.
Fashion and function
Architects always have an important voice in selecting new products. They say they are happy with the wide selection of foreign products. Most of the 10 architects who give interior decoration advice in Kien Truc & Doi Song (Architecture and Life) magazine say that their creativity is unfettered when designing with foreign-made products.
“A lot of my clients ask for bathrooms to be places for relaxation,” observed Tran Le Quoc Binh, an architect from QBi. “Their requests only can be met with foreign-made bathroom products. The bathtubs with massage function, or more luxurious bathtubs that integrate a music player and LCD sensor display, can only be imported from other countries and yet more and more Vietnamese people demand these luxury products.”
Foreign companies such as Toto and Inax are expanding by setting up factories to manufacture products in Vietnam and save on production costs. To date, Inax faucets have been imported, but they will be manufactured in Danang beginning March 2010.
Nguyen Ky, head of sales of Caesar products, said that localization of products is really an important factor to reduce production costs. “Many of our products have a local content rate of 90 percent,” he reported.
According to the HCM City Statistics Office, since 2005, the city has granted licenses to build four million square meters of houses. As living standards improve, people will seek more luxurious products.
Yet if domestic producers offer only the same basic designs, they will make no headway in this emerging market.
vietnamnet, sgtt
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