Shaping and Developing Smart Industrial Production

Vietnam is in the early stage of industrialisation and modernisation. The development of smart industry with breakthrough technologies is essential to raise labour productivity, expand production capacity and enhance economic competitiveness.

This is also the main content of the thematic workshop entitled “Transforming Manufacturing Industries and Agriculture with Disruptive Technology: Emerging Trend and solutions” recently held in Hanoi. The event is part of the Smart Industry World 2017, held in Vietnam for the first time.

Necessity
At the workshop, Deputy Chairman Cao Duc Phat of the Party Central Committee (PCC)’s Commission for Economics emphasised that smart industry with many disruptive technologies is the combination of technical advances in physics, digitisation, biology and other fields to form more new businesses with stunning quality, performance and difference.

Besides, low-cost labour may lose its advantage in the industry at the back of automation and robotisation. Information technology may reduce advantages of centralised production. Natural resources will be gradually replaced with new synthetic materials.

Major technological advances in renewable energy production such as solar and wind power are rapidly cutting costs, thus reducing dependence on fossil energy sources, he said.

Earlier, in his keynote address to the International Exhibition, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc also stressed that, during the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the convergence of advanced technologies will facilitate smart industry development, create totally new competencies in production and business that may have profound impacts on the global economy and each country. Against this backdrop, the Vietnamese government and businesses must transform themselves.

Transforming manufacturing industries with disruptive technologies
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said, countries in the world, depending on their development levels and backgrounds, have different approaches to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In Vietnam, although there is no specific strategy for promoting the Industry 4.0, each and every industry has had certain orientations.

Stressing on business roles, he added that enterprises are both the heart and the driving force of new technology and smart industry development. Business development is defined as a central, long-term task of digital economic development in Vietnam. They must have visions and dreams beyond the national boundary and bring made-in-Vietnam products and services to both domestic and global markets to change and uplift consumer tastes and meet increasing demands of domestic and international markets.

Remarking on high-tech application to organic agricultural development, Ms Thai Huong, President of TH Group, said that Agriculture 4.0 signifies applying modern information technology to agriculture driven by smart gears. Agriculture 4.0 paves the way for further evolution, including unmanned operations. This can help Vietnamese farmers address many future challenges and focus on making high-quality agricultural products.

Accordingly, the most important priorities will be: Having a national digital transformation strategy, facilitating digital economic development engineered by the private sector, and establishing synchronous national digital infrastructure.

In addition, it is necessary to issue labour retraining policies, soon develop and apply specific mechanisms and policies to effectively execute industrial human resource development strategies that meet and fit with demands of accelerated industrialisation and modernisation, growth pattern change, economic restructuring and international economic integration, especially demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Human resources for such industries as electronics, mechanics, processing and manufacturing need giving a greater priority to.

Ha Vu