Furniture fair opens to bring producers, customers together at difficult time
The first Vietnam ASEAN International Furniture & Home Accessories Fair opened at the Saigon Exhibition and Convention Centre in HCM City’s District 7 on August 29, providing a platform for furniture and home accessories producers to display their products and connect with prospective buyers from all over the world.
VIFA ASEAN has 600 booths set up by nearly 200 exhibitors from 12 localities across the country, such as HCM City, Binh Duong, Long An and Binh Phuoc, and 11 countries and territories, including the US, the Republic of Korea, China, Japan, India, the Netherlands, Hong Kong (China), Malaysia, and Thailand, Dang Quoc Hung, director of the Alliance Handicraft Wooden Fine Art Corporation (Lien Minh Company), one of the organisers, said.
Products on display include indoor and outdoor furniture, home decoration and handicrafts, raw wood, machinery, equipment, accessories, and tools for the wood processing and handicrafts industries.
The furniture products are not only diverse in design but are also of high quality and meet international standards to enable exports.
The highlight of the fair is an "ASEAN House" to introduce the region’s unique handicrafts to international buyers.
The fair also includes specialised seminars to help the industry promote exports on e-commerce platforms) and update policies related to production and import-export, and tours to factories in Binh Duong Province on August 30 and 31.
At the opening ceremony, Tran Ngoc Liem, director of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s HCM City branch, said exports of wooden products in the first seven months of the year were down by 26.2% from the same period last year to US$7.2 billion.
But there were signs of recovery in July, as exports rose by 2.8% year-on-year to US$1.1 billion, with shipments to markets such as Turkey, India, Chile, Cambodia, Poland, and Norway seeing sharp rises, he said.
“VIFA ASEAN Fair will be an effective promotion channel that helps wood industry enterprises introduce and promote their brands, expand markets, actively participate in global value chains, helping achieve the target of making the wood processing industry an important sector by 2030, building and developing the Vietnamese wood product brand in the domestic and international markets, and making Vietnam among the leading countries in the world in terms of production, processing and export of wood and wood products.”
Hung said the fair would be “a great exchange event that brings many buyers to exhibitors to partially solve the current order difficulties.”
Organised by Lien Minh Company, VCCI-HCM City and the Vietnam Coconut Association, the fair will run until September 1.
Also at the opening ceremony, Lien Minh Company, the VCCI, the Vietnam Coconut Association, and the industry and trade departments of Binh Phuoc, Tay Ninh, Long An, and HCM City signed agreements to organise VIFA EXPO 2024 and VIFA ASEAN 2024.
