Vietnam textile industry loses at home

Over the years, the Vietnamese textile and garment industry has been successful in boosting exports to other countries, with export turnover growing by 8-10% each year. However, in the domestic market, businesses have not yet dominated the home market, and foreign fashion brands are dominating.

According to the Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association (Vitas), with a population of nearly 100 million people, current textile and garment consumption accounts for 5-6% of Vietnamese people's spending, equivalent to 3.5-4 billion USD, showing that this is a very potential market for textile and garment enterprises.

Sewing products for export to the European market. Photo: Internet

Industry experts say that the Vietnamese fashion market is making positive changes, not only reflected in breakthroughs in design but also in customers' fashion thinking.

However, textile and garment enterprises are also facing fierce competition from foreign rivals, especially the widespread situation of smuggled, counterfeit, fake and poor quality goods that are labeled as Vietnamese and branded goods and are chosen by many consumers.

Not only that, many domestic garment processing establishments and enterprises only invest in quantity, but do not pay attention to quality or brand building, so production costs are low and products are sold at cheaper prices than branded enterprises.

Businesses also said that the biggest difficulty for the garment industry is raw materials, because up to 90% of raw materials must be imported from abroad. Fabrics produced in Vietnam are also more expensive than imported fabrics, especially from China and Korea, so many businesses have chosen to mainly use imported fabrics. Therefore, Vietnamese textiles are known as domestically produced, but most of the raw materials are imported.

Faced with this difficulty, many businesses believe that in order to meet the demand for domestically produced products with domestic materials, garment enterprises must proactively seek domestic sources of raw materials, and at the same time, functional sectors need to have policies to plan, encourage and support the textile and dyeing industry to develop raw material sources. Because without good domestic materials, there cannot be high-quality Vietnamese textiles to serve Vietnamese people.

According to the Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association, businesses need to build a distribution channel network strategy, especially small businesses, and be more active in conquering consumers by investing in design, increasing product quality and restructuring prices accordingly.

At the same time, businesses must standardize their ideological viewpoints, service methods, and keep up with fashion trends... to take full responsibility for their products, in order to create customer trust.

In addition, it is necessary to build industrial zones with wastewater treatment, and call for investment in fiber - weaving - dyeing factories to complete the fabric production process chain, serving the textile and garment industry. This will be the basis for localizing fabric sources, the foundation for the textile and garment industry to transform production from processing to designing and exporting Vietnamese-branded garment products. More importantly, from there, domestic enterprises can take full advantage of the trade agreements that Vietnam has signed.