Privately held businesses have higher export expectations compared to others, international market research agency Grant Thornton has said. The company’s Business Report on this year’s turnover and export forecasts, which surveyed over 7,200 PHBs across 36 economies, found Viet Nam has high expectations with 91% of the enteprises expecting exports to increase this year. India [...]

State President Nguyen Minh Triet expressed his wish that the Saigon Jewelry Company (SJC) and the Asian Commercial Bank (ACB) would see better business results this year, contributing to the country’s socio-economic development. During his visits to SJC and ACB on January 30, the fifth day of the Lunar New Year, the State leader said [...]

More than 4,000 Chinese tourists visited Vietnam through the Lao Cai international border gate during the four-day Lunar New Year festival. Of those, 3,000 people continued their tours to Vietnam ’s famous landscapes such as Ha Long Bay, Nha Trang and Cua Lo. Especially, the Sapa tourist site for the first time welcomed over 1,000 [...]

Vietnamese small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) expect the economy to remain stable or grow this year, with many planning to maintain or increase expenditure and recruitment, according to a survey by HSBC. The semi-annual HSBC Asia-Pacific Small Business Confidence Monitor said on January 15 that SMEs are optimistic about the national economy in the first [...]

Arabica coffee prices rose Wednesday on ICE Futures U.S. in moderate activity and remained within the range of the previous day, when four-month highs were touched. Speculators rolled out of ICE March and into May before the notice period starts in three weeks. The March contract settled up 60 points at $1.2250 a pound, with [...]

Indonesia’s rupiah and Malaysia’s ringgit led a decline in Asian currencies on speculation demand for emerging-market assets will wane as a global recession fans risk aversion. The Bloomberg-JPMorgan Asia Dollar Index, which tracks the region’s 10 most-active currencies excluding the yen, extended this month’s loss after Japan reported the biggest drop in retail sales in [...]

Commenting about the existence of too many steel projects, Head of the Industrial Policies Institute under the Ministry of Industry and Trade Phan Dang Tuat said that this is an unavoidable consequence of the old way of acting in which one follows another in making investments. What would you say about the high number of [...]

Leading South Korean steelmaker POSCO (KSE:005490) said Thursday that Nippon Steel Corp. (TSE:5401) of Japan will take a 15% stake in its project to build a cold-rolled steel mill in Viet Nam for about US$37.2 million. POSCO said last October that Nippon Steel, the world’s number two steelmaker, would buy a stake of 10 to [...]

The northern province of Quang Ninh welcomed three international cruise ships on January 27-28, carrying more than 1,600 foreign tourists. Amazara Quest brought 663 tourists mostly from France, Germany, the US, Canada and the Netherlands to the province while Costa Allegra and Mingfai Princess carried more than 1,000. The Ha Long Travel Agency conducted special [...]

The government has agreed to use most of a US$1 billion economic stimulus package to offer interest rate subsidies for local businesses that have been hit hard by the global financial downturn. At a meeting January 15, the cabinet agreed that the VND17 trillion stimulus package aimed at bolstering the economy would be used mainly [...]

The foreign direct investment (FDI) in HCM City increased sharply in 2008, with more than 680 newly-licensed and increased capital projects worth nearly US$8.7 billion, up over 3.3 times compared to 2007. According to the Ho Chi Minh City Committee for Overseas Vietnamese Affairs, 480 enterprises owned by overseas Vietnamese were established in 2008 with [...]

The Central Highlands province of Lam Dong plans to invest nearly 1.5 trillion VND (85 million USD) in five strategic routes in 2009. Of those, a 31km route linking remote Loc Bac commune in Bao Lam district and Con O commune in Da Teh district will be built at a cost of 500 billion VND. [...]

The main component of the rubber tree is latex, also called “white gold”, because it is an essential material for many technologies. There isn’t a day that passes that we don’t have contact with products made of rubber in our daily activities. When the country was reunified in 1975 the total area of rubber trees [...]

Since the Enterprise Law and Investment Law came into effect two years ago, Viet Nam has created a favourable climate for domestic and foreign businesses of all economic sectors to operate on an equal footing and without discrimination. The number of newly established businesses has increased by 25-26% annually while the amount of registered capital [...]

The power to assess and ratify the environmental impact of new projects coming up in Ho Chi Minh City industrial zones may be transferred from the environmental regulator to zone authorities at the latter’s request. Ngo Anh Tuan, deputy head of the HCMC Export Processing and Industrial Zones Authority (HEPZA), said his agency would soon [...]