Vietnam: Vegetables and fruits among key export items

Following a bumper season in 2017, import/exports continued to increase sharply in the first three months of 2018. Within one quarter, the import and export turnover exceeded $100 billion ($54.3 billion worth of exports and $53 billion imports).

‘The first month [of the Lunar Year] is a time for play’ is a well-known Asian saying. It is, however, no longer true in the global era. Within seven days of the New Year, Vietnamese enterprises exported $289 million worth of products, up by 50 percent, and imported $604 million, up by 45.7 percent compared with last year.

Vegetables and fruits were among the key export items with a growth rate of 35.6 percent, a significant achievement when keeping in mind that six out of nine farm and seafood export products have seen an export turnover decline.

Vietnam’s fruits entered particularly choosy markets, the result of efforts to focus on quality improvement and high added-value exports instead of trying to export as much as possible.

English.vietnamnet.vn reports that the fastest-growing export products are industrial and manufacturing products with much higher values than fruit and veg, with a turnover accounting for 83.3 percent of the total export turnover in the first quarter.