Song Da Corp. Ready to Satisfy Investors

Song Da Corp. Ready to Satisfy Investors

Song Da Construction Corp. is a State-owned enterprise affiliated with the Ministry of Construction. It was set up in 1960 with major businesses of investing in and constructing hydropower plants, electricity transmission lines, transformer stations, and large industrial and civil works. Currently, the corporation is focusing on investing and building urban areas and industrial parks, aiming to become a powerful economic consortium.

Over the process of 40 years of development, the Song Da Corp. has accumulated experience as a leading contractor and investor in large projects. Song Da is now Vietnam’s strongest construction corporation with a work force capable of building advanced and modern hydropower plants. Focusing on labour training and equipment improvement, the corporation has progressively developed. Now it is able to carry out projects under the form of Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC) and general contracting such as projects for construction of Se San 3 and Tuyen Quang hydropower plants. It also played the role of investor for some large projects such as Se San 3A and Nam Chien hydropower plants and Ha Long cement factory. It also jointly invested and was the major developer of enormous hydropower plants such as Yaly, Thac Ba and Hoa Binh. Electricity outputs of factories in which the corporation was a developer or contractor account for 60 per cent of the country’s total electricity.

Recently, the corporation has applied the quality management system of ISO 9001:2000 in order to ensure high quality for its products and services to meet international standards. It is always ready to form joint ventures or partnership with foreign investors to implement investment projects in the fields of construction of hydropower plants and mechanical factories.

The corporation has over 60 affiliated companies with over 30,000 engineers and technical workers, who are present at many construction sites throughout the country. All members of the corporation conduct operations under a common medium and long-term strategy. They cooperate with each other on every project, especially those in which their parent (Song Da) is general contractor or investor. Song Da 10 Co., a strong organisation, specialises in executing underground works and rock blast drilling tasks; Song Da 9 Co. focuses on soil, rock digging and banking while Song Da 1, 8, and 25 companies concentrate on building civil works and industrial factories.

With the objective of meeting increasing demands of investors (in terms of aesthetic value, equality and rate of progress) for projects, especially hydropower plants, the corporation has invested over VND2 trillion (US$128.2 million) in the past ten years to import technology and equipment from Sweden, the US and Japan. For underground works, the corporation bought equipment which was used for the first time in Vietnam such as BOOMER tunnel drill rigs, BOLTEC rock bolting rigs, TAMROCK hydraulic self-propelled drilling rigs and concrete sprayers.

The corporation is now capable of excavating and transporting 40 million cubic metres of soil and rock per year, open blast drilling 20 million cubic metres of soil and rock and tunnel driving 1.5 million cube metres annually. With these abilities, the corporation ensures it can meet all demands of enterprises in the construction sector, particularly in the construction of hydropower plants.

The corporation has recently followed a new direction of self-investing in construction projects. As a result, it was assigned as the investor of large Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) and Build-Operate (BO) projects such as 72MW Can Don hydropower plant, 8.1MW Ry Ninh 2, 210MW Nam Chien, Viet-Y steel factory, My Dinh-Me Tri new urban area and 175-hectare South An Khanh new urban area. This is an appropriate direction for the corporation’s long-term strategy, according to which it will become an effective economic consortium, contributing to the general development of Vietnam’s construction industry in line the trend of integration into the world’s economy.

• Au Le