vietnam export china 8 dec 1

saigon times weekly

Belonging to the first generation of Vietnamese students to study in China and having returned there many times for work, Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Cong Tan knows a lot about the country. Following are some of his opinions about this market.
By Thai Thanh
"The whole world predicts China's admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) would cause fluctuations for the world's economic, trade and investment situation. However, I just want to talk about the agricultural influence.
China is an agricultural power and has some of the world's top agro-products. In addition, China is also an import power. China imports nearly US$30 billion worth of agro-products annually and Hong Kong imports about US$15 billion. In the meantime, Vietnam exports only US$4.3 billion worth of agricultural, forest and aquatic products.
Joining the WTO, China will have to open its market (and so will Vietnam). We will have to find China's strong agro-products with which we cannot compete in order to avoid wasteful investment.
In my opinion, these items include temperate fruits like apples, pears and grapes. We should not invest big money in growing these fruits.
Another strong commodity in China is cotton. Chinese cotton has a very high output; it has lower prices and higher quality compared with domestic cotton. Chinese cotton yields more than three tons of seeds per hectare while ours is under one ton per hectare. Even our textile industry likes to import Chinese cotton because of cheaper prices. China is also the world's leading producer of silk. China can create great breeds of silkworm. Will the Vietnamese silk industry be able to stand firm?
Another traditional commodity in China is pharmaceutical materials, which have the No. 1 position on the global market. When we open our market, it will be flooded with Chinese pharmaceutical materials. I think we should not spend much time producing these four items and have to make careful calculations so that we can both avoid being wasteful and be able to increase our competitiveness.
In fact, China also produces agro-products which are our specialties but their prices are higher, so we have an advantage and should not be afraid of the competition. These are rice, rubber, coffee, pepper, cashew nuts, tea, rambutans, durians, star apples, and aquatics. All of these are more expensive in China than in Vietnam.
China currently has a gross domestic product (GDP) of over US$1 trillion; this figure doubles every 10 years. Chinese people will have greater demand for goods, and this will be a big export chance for the Vietnamese agriculture. The matter is whether our products are able to compete with products of other ASEAN countries on the Chinese market.
We have one weakness: we border China but do not conduct large-scale research in the country; there is a great deal of information about the market, business practices, and businesses of China but we are neglectful of the research. Over the past 10 years fewer people have studied Chinese, China hasn't been researched, and not much information is exchanged between the two countries. Therefore, we do not have many people with profound knowledge of China's economy and businesses, and have not been able to establish trade relations with Chinese partners. We have just sold goods to the southern provinces of China yet no one understands the northern provinces. I think we must establish a team of experts on the Chinese market because this country's economy is still developing and will become an important part of the world's economy. In addition, we have not yet created characteristic Vietnamese commodities which can be remembered by the Chinese. So far, the Chinese just know Ben Tre coconut candies, Hai Duong green bean cakes and Phu Quoc fish sauce. We must build a commercial agriculture with many trademarks in order to penetrate this market.
I hope that we can seize just 10% of the value of Chinese agricultural products."

d'après lui c'est pas sérieux l'étude de marché et puis singapour taiwan pénètrent mieux à shanghai