Flower growers look to online sales amid COVID-19 resurgence Workers at a flower farm in Da Lat City. Traditionally, city dwellers shop for flowers and botanicals at flower markets to fill their home with the most cheerful blooms to celebrate the new year. But many flower growers said that flower markets were not busy this year, leaving them with an oversupply. Nguyen Duy, a flower farm owner in Da Lat City, said that COVID-19 outbreaks in many localities would likely affect people's purchasing power for flowers ahead of Tet festival. Thuy Vu, director of the The Gioi Hoa Tuoi JSC, a wholesale supplier of flowers, said it would not focus on retail sales for the Tet festival this year due to market uncertainty. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Lan, a flower vendor at Ho Thi Ky flower market in HCM City, said flowers stockpiled for the Tet market this year were not as numerous as last year due to concerns over weak purchasing power. Purchasing orders with flower farms are expected to change in the next few days depending on the control of COVID-19, Lan said. Flower farms in Da Lat City have seen a 55 per cent drop in orders from wholesale markets in other cities and provinces, according to a survey of the Da Lat City People’s Committee. The committee, however, has reported a boom in online sales of agricultural produce, flowers and botanicals ahead of Tet. It advised farms to use bank transfer payments for retail orders and to sign contracts with merchants for wholesale orders to ensure the success of online deals. Livestreams Shoppers can find various types of flowers from flower farms and merchants on online shopping platforms. Nguyen Thi Bich Thuy from Biofresh Company in Da Lat City has hosted livestreams via Facebook to guide viewers through different types of flowers and plants available on the farm. Amid the pandemic, live commerce has helped promote and sell products, and engaged potential shoppers, Thuy said. Tran Van Tam, a flower grower in Da Lat …
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Vietnam agriculture targets big firms but should not forget smaller companies
Vietnam tries to attract ‘eagles’, or big investors, into agriculture, but it also needs ‘sparrows’ or cooperatives and small enterprises. Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Le Minh Hoan According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), the farm produce processing industry in Vietnam has been developing rapidly thanks to the application of high technology, thus helping increase the added value of farm produce. Sixty-seven large-scale farm produce processing plants have become operational in the last five years with total investment capital of $2.58 billion, creating new capability that promotes agriculture restructuring. The production and business organization in agriculture has become more suited to the market economy and large-scale production. Many new-generation cooperatives and farms have been set up and are running well. Agriculture firms have been developing rapidly with increasingly large scale. To date, Vietnam has 7,500 facilities that process farm produce in industrial scale for export. Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Le Minh Hoan said Vietnamese enterprises have stepped up investment in agriculture and there have been more and more large economic groups in agriculture sector. “They (large economic groups) understand that agriculture is not the sector which can bring profits immediately, and there are many risks. However, they want to invest in agriculture not just to make money, but also to try to give a push to agricultural production, thus helping change the image of Vietnam’s agriculture,” he said. According to Hoang, this is the biggest value of the investment of the private sector in agriculture. The enterprises help create competitiveness for Vietnam’s farm produce and conquer the global farm produce market. He stressed that it is necessary to respect the contribution of large enterprises which invest in agriculture, acting as ‘eagles’ that lead the sector. However, …
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Rosy outlook for real estate investment
Don Lam - CEO, VinaCapital Group In 2021, residential real estate prices are likely to climb for a variety of reasons, and we expect the industrial sector to continue booming as multinational manufacturers accelerate diversifying their production from China to Vietnam. That said, it is becoming harder for foreign real estate investors to make money in Vietnam because of stiffer competition from increasingly sophisticated local investors and developers. For that reason, we believe the best way for foreign investors to get exposure to Vietnam’s real estate market – which is arguably one of the most attractive markets in the world – is to partner with existing players who are on the ground and who understand those investors’ requirements. Resilient residential market Rents in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi plunged in 2020, which was not surprising given everything that happened last year. However, residential real estate prices increased substantially because the supply of new housing units was constrained (and well below demand), and because interest rates also dropped last year. The unusual combination of falling rents and soaring residential real estate prices was a global phenomenon that is unlikely to be repeated in 2021, but supply constraints will continue putting upward pressure on Vietnam’s residential real estate prices in 2021. We estimate that the combined demand for new housing units in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi is around 200,000 units per year, given Vietnam’s circa 3 per cent per year urban population growth rate, and given an estimated 100,000 per year of new household formations (that is, people getting married). In contrast, only about 60,000 new housing units per year have been launched for sale in recent years, and that figure is likely to have dropped to around 40,000 in 2020 due to COVID-19 as well as to legal and zoning issues that have severely slowed new project approvals in Ho Chi Minh City since 2018. It is very likely that …
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