Workers package dragon fruit at Cat Tuong Agricultural Products Producing Processing Co Ltd. The fruit is favoured by many Korean consumers. (Source: VNA)
Hanoi (VNS/VNA) – Domestic companies have not taken full advantage of
the incentives offered by preferential tariff policies for Vietnamese firms to
sell products to the Republic of Korea, according to the deputy
director-general of the Asia-Pacific Market Department under the Ministry of
Industry and Trade (MoIT).
Le An Hai said that the RoK could be a great market for Vietnam’s agriculture,
forest and fishery exports, but Vietnamese agricultural exports accounted for
only a small amount of South Korea’s total agricultural import value, which was
around 100 billion USD last year.
Hai spoke at a seminar on promotion of processed Vietnamese food, seafood and
agricultural product exports to the RoK held in Ho Chi Minh City on July 28.
Reduced tariffs are available under the Vietnam-RoK Free Trade Agreement, which
came into effect in December 2015, and the ASEAN-RoK Free Trade Agreement,
offering opportunities for Vietnamese exports.
“Though China is still the most important market for Vietnam’s agricultural
products [it imported 16 billion USD worth of Vietnamese agro-forest-fishery
products last year], the RoK is one of our top priority markets,” he said.
“Like Japan, Australia and New Zealand, the RoK is a very strict market in
terms of required quality for imported products. If we can win over these
markets, we can access many other markets more easily,” he added.
According to the General Department of Customs, last year Vietnam imported 32
billion USD of the RoK’s products, up 15.9 percent year-on-year, while exports
were worth 11.4 billion USD, up 28 percent year-on-year.
In the first six months of the year, bilateral trade between Vietnam and the
RoK reached 29.1 billion USD, up 45.5 percent compared to the same period last
year.
The MoIT is launching many efforts to help local firms enhance exports of
Vietnamese agro-forest-fishery products to the RoK to achieve bilateral trade
value of 70 billion USD by 2020.
Products with potential
Yoon Byung Soo, product strategy director of Korean conglomerate Lotte Mart Vietnam,
said that Vietnamese dried mango, dragon fruit, coconut-related products and
coffee were favoured by many Korean consumers.
“Since Vietnam has many fruits that the RoK cannot produce, our supermarket
chains are very interested in these products,” he said.
Yoon said that bananas were a potential product for the RoK because Vietnamese
bananas have good quality and a competitive price similar to the Philippines’,
which is a main source of imports for Korea.
“Recently, our team from Korea visited Vietnam and signed a contract to import
100 tonnes of bananas,” he said.
However, he said that Vietnamese banana growers should pay more attention to
ensuring consistency in the quality of bananas year-round as well as the
hygiene of farms.
Another issue is the hiring of under-aged workers by farmers during harvest
season, he said, adding that the owners of the farms could be fined for doing
so and the reputation of the buyers could be damaged.
He said that Vietnamese firms should also improve product labels and packaging.
Yoon said that he noticed that some Vietnamese product packaging had colourful
labels, but foreign consumers preferred labels with basic colours.
Changing designs of packages could increase sales of products significantly.
One example was the new label for Cuc Da tissue, which increased sales by 80 percent
in only three months.
Yoon said one of the good points of Vietnamese products was the competitive
price. However, to enter a market and win it over, especially through a
supermarket chain, the products should be unique.
“If the firms sell the type of products that are very common on the market,
they will find it more difficult to compete with others that entered the market
before them,” he added./.