Tra Vinh Trade, Tourism and Investment Centre Promotes Bridge Role

The southern province of Tra Vinh chose last year as the year of enterprises to mobilise support from agencies for businesses’ development. Therefore, Tra Vinh Trade, Tourism and Investment Centre built an action programme to implement instructions of the local People’s Committee. The committee held a trade and handicraft village exhibition, Ok-Om-Bok festival and sent delegates to attend two trade promotion programmes in Laos and Cambodia. The province offered support for enterprises’ investment promotion activities in foreign countries. The locality also sent its key products to many countries for promotion. In addition, it joined 10 trade fairs held inside the country to display its major products.

 

The centre has worked out specific solutions. The centre gives professional advices to the People’s Committee to enhance effectiveness of trade promotion. It has also helped local businesses to join trade and investment promotion programmes abroad and built a project to develop annual trade exhibition fair on occasion of Ok-Om-Bok festival into a national trade promotion program. The centre has built a national trade promotion plan from now to 2015, focusing on targeted markets and customers. This is considered as a medium-term plan to open a new way for the province’s economic development in the next years.

 

In addition, the centre has continued cooperating with concerned agencies to call on businesses to sharpen their trademarks. It has offered assistances for enterprises to expand their business and production activities to meet the increasing demand of the market; promoted communications inside and outside the country; built a short-term and long-term training programme to raise capacity for cadres and staffs who work in the area of trade promotion, including skills in negotiation, making strategic policies as well as skills in informatics, English and business.

 

Currently, the centre has considered building an export promotion plan for local firms. This year, it will concentrate on helping companies to survey key foreign markets such as South Korea and the US and participate in export fairs of agricultural and handicraft products at European Seafoods Exposition to be held in Belgium. The firms will be assisted for studying Germany and Australia and joining Fine Food fair and China’s seafood and fishery fair.

 

This year, it will give advices to enterprises in getting loans; offer credit guarantee for small and medium-sized enterprises; introduce advanced production technology; seek partners to expand production and business scale and build trademarks to raise product competitiveness. The centre will join hands with concerned agencies to help the provincial People’s Committee in holding dialogues between authorities and businesses. These are opportunities for leaders to know about enterprises’ difficulties to have timely support for them. It also instructs companies and business households in registering their trade marks and brands and building new brochures for product promotion and cooperates with newspapers and radios to build websites to introduce the province’s potentials and look for outlets for companies’ products. Director of the centreNguyen Thanh Tam saidthe move aims to encourage local people to use domestically-made products.

The centre, a member of the steering board of the programe called “Vietnamese people use Vietnamese goods, will continue cooperating with concerned agencies to organise many trade promotion activities, including fairs, forums, night markets and shops to introduce domestic products to people.