Workers package dragon fruit at Cat Tuong Agricultural Products Producing & Processing Co Ltd. The fruit is favoured by many Korean consumers. (Source: VNA) Le An Hai said that the RoK could be a great market for Vietnam’s agriculture,forest and fishery exports, but Vietnamese agricultural exports accounted foronly a small amount of South Korea’s total agricultural import value, which wasaround 100 billion USD last year.
Hai spoke at a seminar on promotion of processed Vietnamese food, seafood andagricultural product exports to the RoK held in Ho Chi Minh City on July 28.
Reduced tariffs are available under the Vietnam-RoK Free Trade Agreement, whichcame into effect in December 2015, and the ASEAN-RoK Free Trade Agreement,offering opportunities for Vietnamese exports.
“Though China is still the most important market for Vietnam’s agriculturalproducts [it imported 16 billion USD worth of Vietnamese agro-forest-fisheryproducts last year], the RoK is one of our top priority markets,” he said.
“Like Japan, Australia and New Zealand, the RoK is a very strict market interms of required quality for imported products. If we can win over thesemarkets, we can access many other markets more easily,” he added.
According to the General Department of Customs, last year Vietnam imported 32billion USD of the RoK’s products, up 15.9 percent year-on-year, while exportswere worth 11.4 billion USD, up 28 percent year-on-year.
In the first six months of the year, bilateral trade between Vietnam and theRoK reached 29.1 billion USD, up 45.5 percent compared to the same period lastyear.
The MoIT is launching many efforts to help local firms enhance exports ofVietnamese agro-forest-fishery products to the RoK to achieve bilateral tradevalue of 70 billion USD by 2020.
Products with potential
Yoon Byung Soo, product strategy director of Korean conglomerate Lotte Mart Vietnam,said that Vietnamese dried mango, dragon fruit, coconut-related products andcoffee were favoured by many Korean consumers.
“Since Vietnam has many fruits that the RoK cannot produce, our supermarketchains are very interested in these products,” he said.
Yoon said that bananas were a potential product for the RoK because Vietnamesebananas have good quality and a competitive price similar to the Philippines’,which is a main source of imports for Korea.
“Recently, our team from Korea visited Vietnam and signed a contract to import100 tonnes of bananas,” he said.
However, he said that Vietnamese banana growers should pay more attention toensuring consistency in the quality of bananas year-round as well as thehygiene of farms.
Another issue is the hiring of under-aged workers by farmers during harvestseason, he said, adding that the owners of the farms could be fined for doingso and the reputation of the buyers could be damaged.
He said that Vietnamese firms should also improve product labels and packaging.
Yoon said that he noticed that some Vietnamese product packaging had colourfullabels, but foreign consumers preferred labels with basic colours.
Changing designs of packages could increase sales of products significantly.One example was the new label for Cuc Da tissue, which increased sales by 80 percentin only three months.
Yoon said one of the good points of Vietnamese products was the competitiveprice. However, to enter a market and win it over, especially through asupermarket chain, the products should be unique.
"If the firms sell the type of products that are very common on the market,they will find it more difficult to compete with others that entered the marketbefore them," he added./.
VNA
