Enterprises in pandemic: “Form difficulty emerges wisdom” – Part 2: Find directions for new products and services

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Businesses strive to find new directions and new products to overcome difficulties. Photo: Internet

New products mean new opportunities

Referring to flexible and creative agro-forestry enterprises to overcome difficulties due to the pandemic, Phuc Sinh Joint Stock Company is a typical example. Having been dubbed "Vietnam's pepper king", after a long time specializing in exporting raw materials, this enterprise has actively expanded to deep processing since 2016 to increase added value for the products.

Phan Minh Thong, General Director of the company, stated businesses refused to process goods to focus on developing its private branded products to export and sell domestically.

Notably, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the company launched a lot of new products such as refrigerated pink pepper, refrigerated green pepper, and green pepper sauce, to bring diversity and high quality to consumers.

In particular, not only leading the export of Vietnamese pepper, Phuc Sinh Company is also a big coffee exporter. While many businesses in the same industry are struggling because of order difficulties due to the pandemic, this company received the first order from a partner with an impressive new product line, which is Cascara Blue Son La tea.

“Cascara is actually tea made from coffee husks, which are thrown away. I stumbled upon this tea that was sold in the US at a very high price, which made me curious and learn how to make it because the ingredients are available at my company. After more than a year of tinkering and testing, we finally made Cascara and the first batch was ordered in April, right at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Thong.

In the domestic market, the product is sold for only VND150,000 per 100 grams, but it has been purchased by European partners for US$99 per kilogram for retail sale at tea and coffee chains.

An Phat Bioplastics Joint Stock Company (An Phat Bioplastics), is also a good example of finding opportunities in difficulties when launching new products. The company has invested in the production of fully biodegradable products and materials named AnBio.

An Phat's leaders said their product lines have been receiving more orders from America and Europe because the trend of green consumption is developing all over the world. Therefore, by 2023, An Phat aims that completely biodegradable products will contribute 40-50% to their revenue structure.

For the service sector, such as tourism, the Covid-19 pandemic has prevented international visitors from traveling, so travel agencies have to look to the domestic market. But how to attract tourists is a problem with many units. To solve this problem, Vietravel Tourism Company has built more tours for small groups, and upgraded its online tour booking system on their social networks including Facebook and Zalo so customers can easily receive information and make their tour bookings. Additionally, many other businesses have been applying technology, offering many new products and services to meet customers’ needs, thereby helping them to improve revenue, even with great profits if they hit the right market.

Flexibly find opportunities to recover

Businesses are now trying to find ways to overcome difficulties and these ways have actually brought clear results.

Survey results of the General Statistics Office on business trends of enterprises in the processing and manufacturing industries showed that 80.6% of businesses said their third quarter production and business had improved and remained stable. Meanwhile, according to the previous survey results, only 59.2% of enterprises had an optimistic attitude. In addition, retail and business services also prospered again. These are all encouraging signs for the economy, showing that businesses have been less "passive", while being more flexible to find recovery opportunities after the pandemic.

However, difficulties are still there. The pandemic is complicated and many key economies have not reopened, so businesses cannot be subjective when they start to adapt in the "new normal period", because operational plans need to be changeable to meet the unpredictable fluctuations.

Talking about the recovery of enterprises, Assoc. Nguyen Van Nam, Chairman of the Institute for brand and competitiveness strategy, said the Covid-19 pandemic was an opportunity for businesses to look back on themselves and restructure their corporate governance activities. Moreover, this was a lesson for businesses to change their way of doing business, not to do business in a small way, but to switch to methodical and professional business, based on the market demand in the long term to increase "resistance" against risks.

Agreeing with this view, Assoc. Dr. To Trung Thanh, National Economics University, said businesses needed to look for new sources to ensure flexibility and self-recovery. They also need to understand the trends of the market, invest in target customers, predict behavior, and find new marketing and sales options to meet the needs of buyers.

Examples of developing new products and new services of the business community amid the cumulative difficulties caused by Covid-19 pandemic showed that if enterprises try their best to look for a bright way ahead, they will have many opportunities to survive and have strong recovery momentum when the Covid-19 pandemic was controlled.