HungHau Agricultural Joint Stock Company: Reform for Integration

Over the past 40 years of construction and development, HungHau Agricultural Joint Stock Company has affirmed its positive values by its efforts in technological innovation, know-how accumulation, governance, and employee competence improvement. The company’s products have secured the presence in very demanding markets like Europe (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc.), Japan, the United States, Australia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and penetrated deeply into key local distribution channels through well-known supermarkets and restaurants such as BigC, Coop Mart, Metro, Vinmart, Lotteria, Pizza Hut, Seoul Garden and Circle K.

 

 

 

Since its inception, the company has always adopted flexible business strategies to gradually overcome hardships and achieve stunning successes with growing sales and production expansion. The above results evidence the company’s right strategy towards sustainable development based on inherent strengths of the nation with a long coastline and a developed agriculture to increase investment in agricultural and fishery development. And, this orientation will be more effective when Vietnam officially joins the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

 

According to economic experts, joining the AEC and the TPP as well as other bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) between Vietnam and other countries and regions will have significant impacts on the fisheries sector in increasing investment, expanding market shares, boosting domestic production, enhancing processed contents and securing more development opportunities. Particularly in the ASEAN market, the export structure to this market is now much more diverse. In addition to crude oil and rice, other export items such as electronics and components, iron and steel, garments and textiles, seafood and coffee of Vietnam have been exported to ASEAN.

 

But, to seize those opportunities, businesses must overcome existing challenges, limitations and shortcomings. Specifically, when the AEC officially comes into force, Vietnam’s tax cuts will be soon applied to commodities from ASEAN countries. Vietnamese companies will confront certain difficulties in securing the foothold in the domestic market and reaching out to ASEAN member markets. Moreover, integration has posed challenges of rules of origin, technical barriers, trade protectionism, rising competitiveness and labour issues among others to seafood companies.

 

For that reason, to withstand and overcome emerging challenges, seafood companies need to have appropriate investment and adapt to new developments to enhance their competitiveness and catch up with the current integration trend. In addition, the ASEAN Business & Investment Submit 2016 (ABIS), scheduled to take place in Laos in September 2016 on the sidelines the 28^th ASEAN Summit, will connect business communities with ASEAN leaders, global business leaders, entrepreneurs and manufacturing groups. Vietnamese seafood companies should make good use of this opportunity to access and explore potential markets and make necessary changes to expand the market and prove their competitiveness.

 

For HungHau Agricultural Joint Stock Company, with its visionary strategy, the Board of Directors always has comprehensive innovation strategies to meet growing demands. In addition to upgrading modern production systems according to international standards, the company has applied the ISO 22000 quality management system, BRC and HALAL global food safety standards based on the application of HACCP and SSOP-GMP standards. Especially, HungHau Agricultural Joint Stock Company always pays attention to renovating and diversifying its products, particularly high-value items like shrimp, squid, octopus, crab and fish. At the same time, the company focuses on strengthening the workforce and building a professional working environment with the goal of turning out high quality products.

 

In addition to capacity building, the leadership of the company is determined not to lose right on the home ground. But, competent authorities need to have timely changes in policies to support enterprises to deal with difficulties and create a healthy competitive environment for the Vietnamese economy to develop on par with leading nations in the region.