The Ho Chi Minh City International Furniture and Handicraft Fair and Exhibition, or HCMC Expo 2006, set for October 2006, will be a very potential venue for local small woodwork producers to push up exports, according to the event organizers.
The Expo 2006 is Vietnam’s largest industry event and its size will be nothing in comparison to those in countries that have a developed wood processing industry due to the limited space of the fairground at the HCMC International Exhibition and Convention Center (HIECC).
Tran Duc Hanh, head of the trade promotion department of the HCMC Service of Trade, the organizer of Expo 2006, says the organizing committee has stopped taking new registrations for booths and begun preparing the fairground.
Local and foreign companies have registered for around 900 booths while HIECC has enough room for less than 700 booths, so it is possible that the organizer will resort to taking back space from a number of companies that occupy more than one booth as was done in Expo 2005.
“We will give priority to small local furniture and handicraft producers that are financially unable to attend major trade fairs abroad,” Hanh says. That means large exhibitors will have to cut the number of their booths to make room for other smaller enterprises to take part in the forthcoming event in Tan Binh district.
Le Tien Phong, director of Phuong Nam Co. Ltd. based in the central province of Phu Yen, a rattan handicraft producer that first joined an exhibition when it displayed goods at Expo 2004, says wooden furniture makers can introduce their wares to potential foreign importers on the Internet but it is hard for handicraft processors to do this way. Customers need to see and touch the handicrafts and feel their beauty before they decide to buy them.
“The expo is a big opportunity for small handicraft makers in the country’s central region where there are few chances for companies like ours to meet with potential foreign clients,” Phong says. In fact, Phong has received many invitations to trade fairs in the United States, Japan and Germany but taking part in these events is just a pipe dream for his company that has long been struggling with financial constraint.
Actually Phuong Nam’s annual sales revenue ranges from $1 million to $2 million, making it hard for the company to cover prohibitively high goods transport, air travel and booth leasing costs to join a trade fair overseas. For Expo 2006, the enterprise needs to pay a total of over $1,000 to occupy a booth.
Nguyen Van Quy, director of Ho Nai Co. Ltd., a wood processor in southern Dong Nai province with annual export revenue of $ 2-3 million, says his company used to participate in trade fairs in the U.S. and Europe. “I’ve found that it is not suitable for small enterprises like ours to join huge fairs abroad,” he says. “Only those fetching dozens of millions of U.S. dollars a year can find these events useful.”
At large fairs in foreign countries, small companies seem to be lost in huge crowds as they do not really know who are their potential customers and who are not while large foreign companies always shun working with exhibitors who are not able to implement bigger orders than their output capacity.
Quy says events like Expo 2006 are appropriate for the majority of export wood processors.
Expo 2004 was also the first event Quy’s company attended to showcase its goods, mostly old ones. In Expo 2005, he gained some experience in making his booth attractive to visitors and after the event, he won many new orders from the U.S. He says foreign corporate visitors who spend time and money visiting an exhibition in Vietnam almost make up their mind to choose Vietnamese suppliers.
“Foreign visitors to trade fairs never spend time and money going to Vietnam for leisure travel,” Quy says, adding they are serious about business.
Vietnam is now home to nearly 2,000 enterprises involving in woodwork producing and exporting. In the first seven months of this year, local enterprise exported $1.1 billion worth of furniture, up 21.5 per cent on year.
Saigon Times Daily
Vietnamese
