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Up to now, Vietnam's textile and garment has been a key economic sector with a large export turnover bringing a huge amount of foreign currenciy to the country. Besides exporting, how do you evaluate opportunities in the domestic market, especially under the negative impact of Covid-19 on textile exports?
- Textile comprises a very high volume of the export industry and thanks to the signing of many free trade agreements (FTAs), opening up many opportunities to promote production in this industry. In 2019, Vietnam's textile and garment export turnover reached US$39 billion. However, in addition to focusing on the export market, over the past time, textile enterprises also need to focus on exploiting the domestic market.

The textile industry is considered one of the key sectors serving the essential needs after food. With a population of nearly 100 million people, the volume of the domestic textile market is estimated at $5-6 billion. Therefore, it can be a very potential market for textile and garment enterprises. Especially, in the long run, the domestic market is developing sharply along with higher and higher living standards.

What has the textile industry been doing to make the exploitation of the domestic market more efficient after a longtime concentrating on exports?

- Besides Vietnam, many other countries also produce textiles. There was a time when small-scale goods and counterfeit goods were widely sold on the market. These products are available and suit every pocket so they are in high competitiveness against made – in Vietnam products. However, thanks to the domestic market development programme associated with the campaign "Vietnamese people give priority to using Vietnamese goods", people's perception of consumption behaviour has been changed, and at the same time awareness of responsibility of textile enterprises serving the domestic market has also been enhanced. Enterprises try to produce, change technology and build a distribution system to remote areas to bring goods to the people

Competitive pressures also forces domestic enterprises to make breakthroughs for higher competitiveness. Photo: Nguyen Thanh

What are the outstanding difficulties and challenges textile enterprises are facing when they want to better dominate the home market?

The domestic market currently accounts for only 15% of production capacity of textile enterprises. Textile enterprises are going on both "two feet" domestic and export. The industry has many solutions to promote domination of the domestic market like focusing on quality improvement; building brand images with affordable prices for people; organizing annual advertising fairs to change people's perception behavior. The textile and garment industry also has an emulation movement to bring domestic market revenue into the industry's emulation criteria; develop the internal market for the industry such as: producing fabric for sale to garment enterprises and linking enterprises of yarn, textile, sewing, distribution.

- Manufacturing and exporting enterprises benefit from a lot of priorities because they don’t need to worry about designs, raw materials or sales locations. Meanwhile, businesses in the domestic market have to take care of everything. Obviously, textile export products have more certain advantages over domestic consumption ones.

It must also be added that, at present, there are still many cases of smuggled goods, counterfeit goods and counterfeit goods bearing made- in Vietnam labels so consumers struggle to recognize the real products. As a result, the State must issue policies and solutions to create an equal business environment. In terms of market management, enterprises need multi-faceted support from State management agencies.

In addition, the State needs to issue many relevant mechanisms especially implement tax policies to promote and support production in the domestic market. Nowadays, every stage from yarn, textile and garment must pay value added tax. Therefore, is it possible to reduce or exempt taxes for businesses using fabrics to serve the domestic market?

Businesses looking to domestic market amid pandemic Enterprises in certain sectors have mapped out plans to increase their presence in the domestic market as ...

On the other hand, many businesses are weak in financial capacity with not much competiveness in the domestic market, so to enhance their competiveness; they need synchronous support from the State, theirefforts as well as alternative consumption behaviour of people.