Orders for leather and footwear sector up 16 percent

The reason for this is a shortage of labour in China for labour-intensive industries. Chinese people’s living standards have improved with the average GDP increasing to more than US$3,000 per capita and career choices have also changed. As a result, many customers turn to good quality Vietnamese leather and footwear products at reasonable prices.

As manufacturing costs in Vietnam are very low, labourers’ incomes have not improved compared to other sectors. It is very important to devise long-term solutions to attract more labourers to the sector. Currently, the rate of processing in the leather and footwear sector accounts for 70 percent.

In the first seven months of the year, the sector’s total export earnings reached US$2.75 billion, including nearly US$700 million from the American market, up 13.8 percent against the same period last year.

Garment and textile sector has enough orders through the end of this year

In the first seven months of 2010, Vietnam earned US$5.78 billion from exporting garments and textiles against the set annual target of US$10.5 billion.

Many businesses have already received enough export orders for the remainder of the year.

Businesses have been very successful in negotiating prices with an average increase of 15 percent over the last year, which has contributed to improving their competitive edge in such markets as the US, Japan and Europe. Economic and trade agreements between Vietnam and other countries have also contributed to increasing the country’s export turnover.

Apart from signing orders to promote exports, the garment and textile sector has paid more and more attention to the domestic market by launching campaigns such as “Vietnamese people use Vietnamese products” or “Bringing Vietnamese products to rural areas”. Many supermarkets under the Vietnam Garment and Textile Group have a development strategy to boost the domestic market and are striving to raise their retail sales goals by 17-20 percent this year.