Capital markets in focus

Hanoi People’s Council just ratified the city’s wholesale and retail network draft planning to 2020 with a vision towards 2030 with top priority given to building and upgrading existing market system in Hanoi.

Hanoi authorities envisage not building new markets in the city’s inner and shortly turning fresh traditional markets into multi-functional markets. Towards this goal, those markets with area exceeding 10,000 square metres each will be turned into first class markets like trade centres while markets with area below 2,000sqm will be planned into third class supermarkets, grocery stores and convenience stores.

The market system planning was hot on the agenda in a recent Ministry of Industry and Trade meeting discussing traditional market organisation in Vietnam’s urban areas.

Canada-based HealthBridge’s Liveable Cities programme consultant Stephanie Geertman assumed with this fresh planning scheme many markets in the city’s inner would be superseded with supermarkets, leading to disappearance of fresh traditional markets.

“Traditional markets gradually be replaced with the supermarket system will abate the opportunities to access fresh food of customers, while driving up commodity prices. Socially, many needy people will lose jobs,” said Geertman.

She pointed out to the Brazil case saying it had to shut doors of 1,000 supermarkets on the back of recent economic downturn whereas traditional markets which were on existence for several hundred years were almost immune from crisis implications.

Hanoi’s former chief architect Dao Ngoc Nghiem assumed traditional market model should be part of Vietnam’s urban centres in the future. Thereby, public space reserved for traditional markets should be factored on when building modern urban centres.

According to Hanoi Department of Planning and Investment, the city is calling investment for its some trade centre projects. This includes a project on building a mixed-use and trade centre complex in Ha Dong district’s Duong Noi area over 14,000sqm at an estimated investment of VND200 billion ($9.5 million), a project on building a seafood wholesale and retail centre, trade quarter and food shop area in Ha Dong district’s Yen Nghia ward over 29,000sqm at VND346 billion ($16.4 million) and one other on building Dong Tam market in Ba Vi district at VND73 billion ($3.4 million), just to date a few.