Current situation of Vietnam’s packaging industry
In recent years, demand for high quality packaging products which does not use chemicals or plastic composition has significantly increased. The Government of Vietnam and concerned industries have been calling for and encouraged packaging enterprises to increase further investment in this area. However, the current packaging industry in the country still can not meet with domestic demand, therefore the possibility to export packaging products overseas is too difficult to achieve in the near future. Domestic enterprised often have to import packagings from the neighbouring countries with better packaging industry such as Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia ... etc.
Vietnam’s current packaging industry not only does not meet the demand for quantity, many products made by domestic manufacturers have not yet reached the international standard in order to be exported to foreign markets. Many types of packagings have very poor quality, plus the use of plastic packagings as well as with high levels of chemicals are still quite common. this extremely affects the health of consumers as well as causing great harm to the environment although the Government has promulgated Environmental Laws with the aim to reduce the harms of those types of packagings.
The main reason for packaging sector not to attract many enterprises to invest in is because it requires a great amount of money for investment, while the payback time takes rather long for investors to wait. Moreover, this is not a field that enjoys investment preferences by the Government, for that reason many packaging manufacturers in the country are still using out of date machineries and equipments, the stages to make finished products after printing is still manual and low in quality due to asynchronous production line.
To meet the international standards, domestic enterprises need to invest tens of billions of VND to buy advanced technologies, however they can only be used for a few years, then again they need replacing for other technologies. In particular, technology investment is not enough, it also requires investment for a synchronous production line from new workshop to raw material and labour force to guarantee for the production of high quality packaging products.
Some problems that the Vietnam’s packaging manufacturers facing thesedays are:
- Packagings must be environmentally friendly, which is a real challenge, and also a healthy direction that the packaging manufacturers of Vietnam must seriously pay attention to, then must quickly act in order to keep pace with the common trend around the globe.
- The technical advances are being increasingly applied, from which the changes, innovative technology and equipment is not only subjective requirement but also objective demands for cutting costs, therefore not only production lines must be continuously improved, in many circumstances the entire shift to higher performance is needed as well.
- Other challenges such as raw material prices on the increase, the strict technical barriers ... as well as competitive solutions applied by other packaging competitors also cause an increase in production costs.