Exports prospects in 2017 are promising

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At the Supply Governance Forum towards 2017 held by the Vietnam Supply Chain this weekend, more than 100 supplymanagement experts and businesses from many sectors and industries discussed domestic market trends, production for export, consumption trends, technology, staffing matter, challenges, opportunities and visions for 2017.

The speakers are discussing at the Forum. Photo: T.H

Build prestige in the community

According to the experts, generally, 2016 was a favorable year for Vietnam's economy. Among the Asian developing countries, Vietnam ranked 3rd on the GDPgrowth rate at 6.7%, only after India and China. The GDP growth rate of Vietnam in 2016 was forecasted to reach 6.5%. Currently there are more than 101,500 new established businesses with a total registered capital of $US 35.5 billion, up by 17.1% on the number and 48.1% on the capital over the same period in 2015. The average capital of a new registered business was$ US 345,700, up by 26.5% over the same period in 2015. These will be the motives to help businesses developed.

A representative of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) took the importance of the community’s role into consideration and stressed that enterprises should focus on building prestige in the community by responding to the expectations of society not only at the level of trade in price and quality, but also at the level of sustainable welfares and benefits. Around the middle of 2017, enterprises should pay attention toISO 20400 and focus on the sustainable supply chain.

At the forum, businesses and experts who represented the key export sectors of Vietnam such as: Agricultural products, textile and apparel and electricity and electronics also shared their views on advantages and disadvantages of Vietnam for production for export.

Concerning the wage policy, the businesses said; the minimum wage in 2017 will increase by 7.3%, less than in previous years but can be considered as favorable for businesses, because in fact, facing the pressures of competition, businesses are willing to pay higher wages to keep long-term workers.

A representative of atop exporting enterprise of electronic products said that Vietnam is now the manufacturing center of exporting goods for their key markets in the world. The businesses agreed that the wages of Vietnam in the next several years will remain highly competitive in the region. On the whole, though Vietnamese labor productivity was still low, the open attitudes to innovations of Vietnamese made the deployment of improvement projects in manufacturing more convenient.

Relating to technology application, businesses thought that the willingness to upgrade and adapt to new technology was very important. Besides, business also stated their expectations on digitalization of goods import and export procedures to reduce the clearance time and improve the competitiveness for businesses, and boost production and exports.

Logistics services technologized

Concerning goods import and export procedures, representatives of domestic and international logistics companies shared, the business performances were relatively favorable in 2016 and believed in prospects in 2017. An important lesson for the logistics businesses in the last year was the case of Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The high value items like Samsung are usually transported by air to ensure quickly supply to the markets.

However, because of the high risk of fire, this kind of phone was not allowed on airplanes, which then hindered the supply chain of Samsung and became a difficulty for logistics service partners of Samsung.

In addition, logistics companies also found the significant impact of the development trend of artificial intelligence on the logistics industry. The progress of the smart intellectual field was deployed for testing by the World’s leading companies and gained satisfactory results as a springboard for the smart intelligence to be actualized soon. One modern technology tested was "smart secretary" that replaced the role of a secretary with automatically contacting, communicating and arranging appointments for directors, learning and understanding the director’s habits and hobbies to constantly improve.

For logistics, current researches on robots can replace people to perform actions such as preparation of goods, transport of goods, and inspection and counting of goods are being conducted and have been tested by leading businesses. Many people said that the future of the world's robots can be researched and developed in economic powerhouses but likely will be manufactured in countries such as Vietnam.

Moreover, the technology also has great influence to the success of the logistics industry when the electronic commerce is growing rapidly. The e-commerce businesses had advances in using algorithms to analyze the volume of large number of data to predict what consumers will buy before they realize their needs on products. Hence, online shopping will become quicker and more aggressive; and the logistics services need to catch up with the rate through smart technologies.

Most of the businesses feel optimistic about the economy in 2017. Although the TPP may not be adopted, that cannot change the fact that Vietnam is one of the largest trade partners in exports to US. Besides TPP, Vietnam can expect other trade agreements such as the Eurasian trade agreement forecasted to increase by 2.27% into the GDP growth rate of Vietnam.

By Le Thu/ Huyen Trang - Customs news