Foreign investment management authorities of provinces/cities reported that the world economy is gradually recovering so many foreign investors are returning Vietnam to finish uncompleted projects or start their investment progress with long-planned projects.
Typically, Taiwanese Compal announced it would put into operation $500 million laptop manufacturing factory in Vinh Phuc province's Ba Thien Industrial Zone into operation within 2010 after a standstill period.
A representative from Vinh Phuc province EZ Management Board said that Compal is installing machines for the factory. Work on laptop factory was started from late 2007 and planned to turn out the first product lot in 2009, but under the impacts of global economic crisis, this work has not been implemented on time. Returning Vietnam, Compal lowered the designed capacity of this factory in Vietnam down to only 500,000-600,000 laptops a month. At present, Compal is the original design manufacturer of famous brand names such as Dell, HP, Acer, Toshiba, Fujitsu, and Lenovo. Thus, once the factory Compal Vietnam is operational, Vietnamese consumers can have chance to buy original laptops in the country.
In addition, Taiwanese Foxconn Group, the world's leading electronic producer, also announced the $200 million project on building a mobile phone manufacturing factory in northern Vietnam with the estimated capacity of 89 million handsets a year. The investor is also re-promoting the infrastructure development project in Trang Cat urban high tech park of Hai Phong City through cooperating with the domestic partner named Kinh Bac Urban Development Joint Stock Co (KBC) to set up a 50:50 joint venture. The JV project worth $200 million will be conducted by late 2010 on over 1,000 hectares in Trang Cat Commune, Hai An Dist, comprising the industrial zone for high tech, golf course and urban area.
According to Dang Thanh Tam, chair of KBC said that $200 million is used to develop infrastructure of the project only. Then Foxconn will directly build billions-US dollar electronic factories here. Foxconn, that now owns a series of factories producing electronic equipments branded name iPod, IPhone of Apple Inc, laptop of Hewlett-Packard Co, super-slim handsets of Motorola Inc, and others, will soon carry out construction on these kinds of factories in Vietnam, Tam added. These were previously in the group's $5 billion investment plan in Vietnam but they had to be delayed because of global financial and economic recession.
Many forecasts showed that 2010 FDI attraction of Vietnam will be higher. But the more importance is how to speed up the disbursement progress and increase the FDI capital usage efficiency.
Reported by Ministry of Planning and Investment's Foreign Investment Department, the actualised FDI amount of January 2010 reached about $400 million while the newly registered and increased capital attained $318 million. Entering February, there was extra $700 million of actualised FDI, bringing total disbursed FDI volume of first two months to $1.1 billion, a year-on-year rise of 10 percent. This is a recorded result despite a fall in newly registered FDI capital.
According to specialists, the efficiency of FDI disbursement is the focus of Vietnam's FDI attraction for 2010 and following years. The country lured over $64 billion of registered FDI in 2008, over $21 billion in 2009 but the actualised capital of these two years gained only $21.5 billion, accounting for 25 percent of registered capital. With the disbursement speed, the implementation of FDI projects will be faster in 2010. A source said that many big foreign invested projects will be started within this year.
Le Van Dung, vice head of Dung Quat EZ Management Board said that some foreign investors having projects in Dung Quat EZ are tending to restart investments after a delayed period.
Turning the registered FDI capital into actualised capital is the big challenge because Vietnam's capital absorption capacity is limited.
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