Vietnam's SMES Facing Difficulties in WTO Accession

“Vietnamese small and medium-sized enterprises are attempting to draft a roadmap to help the nation’s small businesses overcome difficulties and become more competitive on the threshold of Vietnam’s accession to the WTO,” said the Vice Chairman of the Party Central Committee's Economic Committee Cao Sy Kiem.

 

To deal with the situation, the Vietnam Association of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (VINASME) has held a conference entitled Viet Nam Small and Medium Enterprises and WTO Accession in coordination with IBM.

 

To achieve sustainable growth while fully integrating into the global economy, domestic SMEs should uncover and concentrate upon their core values, said Abraham Thomas, Vice President of IBM’s Global Mid-Market Business in Southeast Asia and South Asia.

 

Based on his experience, Abraham stressed that three factors, consisting of business specialisation, flexible IT infrastructure, and global prestigious brand names, were central to the success of SMEs. Business specialization will promote the CBM business mode to seek its core values and help businesses operate more effectively in global economy. Meanwhile, the flexible IT infrastructure will encourage an increasing number of enterprises to apply service-oriented architecture (SOA) for speeding their business up. The SOA will orient business to divide their operations into several sections. Of these, the most essential section will be selected to be performed by the enterprise while the remainder will be hired from others. This method will enable enterprises to become more flexible and initiative in their operations and help them take advantage of professional services provided by others. On joining the global economy, Vietnamese small and medium-sized enterprises will not be restricted by geographic boundaries in their operation expansion. They realize that global economic integration is not necessarily difficult for them in the current context that IT and transport industries are booming at the highest-ever rate.

 

Enterprises would be able to participate more in the process of international labour distribution and become satellites of global groups.

 

VINASME vice president Ly Dinh Son has pointed out many difficulties that are likely to face Vietnamese small and medium-sized enterprises in integrating into the World Trade Organization. Son also warned that stiff competition is likely between domestic small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and foreign enterprises in light of the fact that the competitiveness of domestic SMEs is limited by a lack of market information. Meanwhile poor cooperation between SMEs is another reason given.  

 

Representatives from Viet A Company and VVN Company have also presented their ideas on opportunities and challenges during the WTO integration process. According to the TNS Market Research Company, Vietnam should be more cautious in expanding markets and conducting market surveys.