VCCI Can Tho: Helping Enhance Mekong Delta Businesses’ Strength

 

VCCI Can Tho often holds meetings, forums and conferences of regional and world levels which are good opportunities for Mekong Delta companies to display their products. Vo Hung Dung, VCCI Can Tho Director said, his agency has attracted 776 direct members and 556 indirect members in all cities and provinces in the Mekong Delta region. This is an active factor to make its successes over the past time.

 

Being a trade and investment promotion agency in the Mekong Delta region, VCCI Can Tho has cooperated with the local promotion centres to set up “Club of Mekong Promotion Centres-Mekong PC” in 2005 which included 23 members and VCCI Can Tho director is the club chairman. The members cooperate in implementing trade and investment promotion activities to share information about fairs and exhibition as well as call for firms to join the promotion programmes inside and outside the country.

 

Since 2005, VCCI Can Tho has organised forums to seek investors in the Mekong Delta region annually. In 2009-2010 period, VCCI Can Tho has coordinated with the Can Tho People’s Committee and Southwestern Steering Board to hold an investment for the city and the region. Under the instruction by the central VCCI, from 2010, VCCI Can Tho will join hands with the Southwestern Steering Board to oragnise Mekong investment promotion forum. It will VCCI cooperate with foreign organisations to hold trade exchange events between Mekong Delta enterprises and international partners, conference entitled “Doing business with foreign markets” and forum on cooperation between Vietnam and foreign countries. These events are expected to help companies to seek partners. VCCI Can Tho and the central VCCI will jointly send business delegations abroad to learn experiences and promote their products.

 

In addition, VCCI Can Tho operates two websites namely www.vccimekong.com.vn and www.mekongdelta.com.vn to provide information about market, business activities of domestic and foreign companies, introducing potential customers and publishing comments and free adversitsing news for companies.

VCCI Can Tho often provides enterprises with training courses on measures to deal with trade disputes, banking and labour and seeks companies’ opinions on business difficulties. VCCI Can Tho cooperates with enterprises to establish Mekong Delta Tourism Assosiation and regional profession associations. Over the past three years, they set up eight associations in eight localities, including two regional ones. They aim to raise the number to 13 regional associations in the coming time. VCCI Can Tho will help associations to hold dialogues with localities to facilitate business environment. Provinces which have associations will have higher economic growth than others.

 

Particularly, early this year, VCCI Can Tho held a conference named “Analysing provincial competitiveness index” in Mekong Delta cities and provinces. In 2005, VCCI Can Tho only assessed provincial assessed Can Tho based on the national PCI. Since 2006, VCCI Can Tho directly analysised the index in most of Mekong Delta localities through conferences, forums and training courses. During the four-year implementation, the Mekong Delta region has seen considerable improvement in capacity of local authorities.

 

Furthermore, VCCI Can Tho oragnises a training course “Local marketing” in Mekong Delta cities and provinces and coordinates with provinces to analysise and assess business environment. The course aims to help raise provincial cadres’ capacity in economic management.

VCCI Can Tho now has 776 direct members and 556 indirect members. It pays much attention to supporting its members as most of them are small and medium enterprises. Supporting activities include consultancy and helping businesses to deal with problems related to administrative procedure simplification, holding exchange meetings among companies inside and outside the region, providing trade and information for businesses, assisting firms to seek information of foreign partner and offering special priorities for taking part in the branch’s activities.

 

VCCI Can Tho always provides the business community and regional entrepreneurs with modern and effective training courses, helping to raise their management capacity in the current situation. VCCI Can Tho’s training courses are very successful, making it become an effective training centre for entrepreneurs in the Mekong Delta region. VCCI Can Tho has cooperated with partners from the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City to open six Chief Executive Officers (CEO) training courses in the Mekong Delta region and trained 280 CEOs. They have trained 114 Chief Financial Officers (CFO) through three training courses and 114 and trained 40 Chief Personnel Officers.

 

Inhouse training has become the strength of VCCI Can Tho. Every year, the agency organises many training courses on soft skills such as sales, customer care, corporate culture and debt withdrawal for companies in Can Tho as well other regional localities. VCCI Can Tho has designed a training process at businesses, which has been effectively applied. Inhouse training courses are very suitable for real condition of businesses to help learners to absorb and apply the knowledge the best.

Vietnamese aquatic firms should have a careful look in export challenges in the short and long term to bring the best firm. The seafood sector needs to pour more investment in material development and give priorities to key products such as shrimp, tra and basa pangasius and molluse. It is necessary to get technical assistance and enhance inspection on food safety at aquatic growing, processing and distribution areas.

 

The VCCI has joined hands with Germany’s GTZ to carry out a research on value chain of tra and basa pangasius in Long Xuyen, An Giang province in 2004. In the cooperation programme, VCCI Can Tho is the member of the mobilising board for the establishment of the Mekong Delta tra and basa association. The VCCI and Vietnam-EU Private Sector Support Program (VPSSP) in Can Tho to invite consultants and companies to study Can Tho aquatic companies, hire marketing experts to design an aquatic logo and then issue a directory to introduce Can Tho aquatic firms and a list of companies in three languages to serve trade promotion activities.

 

Regarding material issues, VCCI Can Tho and the programme have conducted a survey on tra and basa pangasius breeding in An Giang and Dong Thap provinces to make recommendations for the Mekong Delta region’s tra and basa pangasius breeding.

 

VCCI Can Tho also analysed and assessed competitiveness of the industrial sector, including aquatic processing and raising, and then submitted this to a review meeting of the industry and trade sector held in 2008 in Tra Vinh province. It helped to deal with difficulties for aquatic companies’ operations.