Supporting industries essential to continuing Japanese investment

Japanese direct investment  into Vietnam accounted for 51 per cent of the total in 2012 and 32 per cent between January and September this year, said Hirotaka Yasuzumi, managing director of JETRO’s Ho Chi Minh City office.

“Investment from Japanese companies is vigourous,” he told the Vietnam-Japan Investment Promotion Forum in the southern hub on October 9.

He said Vietnam needed to learn from Thailand in terms of boosting the development of supporting industries to attract Japanese companies, particularly as they are eager to make the move to Vietnam due to rising labour costs in China and Thailand.

Yasuzumi added that small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in Japan are anxious to invest in Vietnam as well, though they face similar problems with supporting industries.

JETRO started a business conference today in Ho Chi Minh City that will run through the 12^th at the Saigon Convention and Exhibition Centre in District 7.

“This time our focus is on business alliances, much more complicated than the last time,” he told the forum, held by Ho Chi Minh City’s Investment and Trade Promotion Centre (ITPC).

State-run leading lender VietinBank, of which Japan’s Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ holds a 20 per cent stake, provides a lot of credit to Japanese companies investing in Vietnam as well as local exporters to Japan.

Nguyen Thanh Tung, a Vietinbank Ho Chi Minh City director, said the Japanese bank is one of the world’s largest and has greatly supported the Vietnamese lender.

The Japan Finance Corporation, another Vietinbank partner, regularly recommends the lender to Japanese SMEs and issues stand-by letters of credit to guarantee Japanese enterprises’ loans.

ITPC director Pho Nam Phuong announced that Ho Chi Minh City would be sending a business mission in October to Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Yokohama to further enhance the cooperation between the two.