People shop at Hapro Market in Ha Noi's Hai Ba Trung District. A campaign launched three years ago to encourage Vietnamese consumers to purchase locally-made products is showing signs of progress. — VNA/VNS Photo Quang Quyet

HA NOI (Biz Hub)— A campaign launched three years ago to encourage Vietnamese consumers to purchase locally made products is showing signs of success, according to the Ministry of Industry and Trade.

Up to 59 per cent of consumers have prioritised using Vietnamese goods, while 38 per cent have advised their families and friends to choose home made products and 36 per cent have stopped buying or have bought fewer imported goods, having replaced them with local goods, said Le Viet Nga, deputy director of the ministry's Department of the Domestic Market.

According to the ministry's statistics, the number of consumers who believe the quality of local products has improved has increased to 77 per cent compared with just 23 per cent before the campaign was launched.

After running the campaign for three years, locally made products accounted for 80-90 per cent of goods on shelves in supermarkets such as Big C (90 per cent), Saigon Co-op and Vinatex Mart (nearly 95 per cent).

In order to further boost Vietnamese product sales, Nga emphasised the importance of continuing to improve awareness among local consumers about locally made goods, improving the competitiveness of domestic enterprises and developing effective distribution channels.

Vu Thi Kim Hanh, president of the Business Association of High-Quality Vietnamese Goods, noted that assistance should be provided to enterprises, especially small and medium-sized firms (SMEs), to ensure their products appear on supermarket shelves.

SMEs faced many difficulties when negotiating with supermarkets to stock their products and often lost out to competition from multinational companies, she added.

Under the draft project created by the ministry to develop the domestic market in line with the awareness campaign for locally made products, a database of distribution systems will be set up along with store chains to ensure the availability of products with stable prices across all 63 cities and provinces.

The draft project targetted seeing 90 per cent of Vietnamese consumers using made-in-Viet Nam products, while raising the turnover of these goods through major distribution channels nationwide to over 70 per cent by 2015. — VNS