Founded in 1976 as a State-owned Plantation, and having undergone several transformations to its current form as a one-member limited company, Song Kon Forestry Company still maintains stability and constant expansion. In particular, as a company operating in forestry, Song Kon has always well implemented forestation and forest protection. This has increasingly insured its important role in underpinning socio-economic development and maintaining political stability of the locality.
With its main functions of forest protection and management, forestation, seedling production and woodchip export, Song Kon Forestry Company currently manages around 15,000 hectares including 3,000 hectares of planted forest and 12,000 hectares of natural forest located in the three districts, namely Vinh Thanh, Tay Son and Hoai An.
For many years, the company has always fulfilled the targets and tasks assigned by the State such as revenue, rate of return, and annual contribution to state budget. As a result, employee quality of life has been constantly improved. With average income of VND 5 to 7 million per person, Song Kon is the business that provides the highest income in the industry. The company is also actively involved in charitable social work.
The most notable about Song Kon Company is its realization of forestation and forest protection. Over the years, the company has made relentless efforts to protect and develop area of planted and natural forest, minimize illegal exploitation of wood transport, limit deforestation and well implement fire protection.
Forest protection has been a difficult task for many localities over the years. Mr Vo Van Cuong, Director of the company said: "For effective forest protection, the company has adopted a number of measures including the formation of self-management households, allocating plots of forest area to each household for management. From these individual households, household groups in the form of village and commune level management boards will be set up.”
For forestation area, the company makes direct assignment to employees on the basis of associating responsibilities with rights. The company conducts examination and evaluation of the result on monthly and quarterly basis and has reasonable bonus and pay policy. Thanks to this, deforestation has significantly been reduced and forest productivity has thereby been enhanced.
Song Kon used to be a small enterprise and operate in many hard conditions. It is the activeness, creativity, hard work, strong will and high solidarity of all the company’s members that make Song Kon as successful as it is today. The company possesses an experienced contingent with many years working experience in forestry.
In the context of economic recession when quite a few businesses are grappling with various difficulties, the company maintains stability and sustainable development. According to Mr Vo Van Cuong, the company’s success in overcoming all of the difficulties is attributed to its focused specialization with the proper definition of forestry’s role in investment activity.
Currently, Song Kon Forestry Company has a wood processing workshop and a woodchip manufacturing factory with a capacity of 400 tonnes per day. With forest planting area of nearly 3,000 hectares which ensures the material supply, the company can profit dozens of billions of VND every year from woodchip export activity. In 2011-2015, the company will continue to promote investment in forestation for woodchip exploitation to serve export, setting up an integrated material zone with the total area of 3,000 hectares. Simultaneously, the company conducts activities including association with local households to develop a material zone of 2,000 hectares, and cooperation with Vietnam SHAIYO Ltd (Thailand) to do research and produce superior forest seed for production.
In addition, with the mountainous terrain, in the coming time, the company will cooperate with local people to plant rubber trees on about 3,000-4,000 hectares to generate stable incomes for local people and limit deforestation.
Duy Hanh
Vietnamese
