Nguyễn Anh Tuấn, Chief Financial Officer of PAN Group. — Photo courtesy of PAN Group

Japan is an important export market of the PAN Group, accounting for more than 40 per cent of our export turnover, equivalent to US$200 million annually. We have many long-standing commercial partners as well as technology partners in agriculture and food sectors.

Over the past 10 years, technological co-operation has become deeper and broader, following Việt Nam's economic development, consumer demand, and production capacity. We have been co-operating with Japanese partners in many sectors such as plant varieties, high quality rice, processed seafood, confectionery and fresh flowers for exports.

There are three important points when co-operating and investing in the field of high-tech agriculture with Japanese partners that we have concluded during the co-operation and investment process. It is necessary to have good preparation of financial resources, because doing high-tech agriculture is not cheap, especially with partners and technology from Japan. For example, we invested in a rice line from Satake (Japan) with a value of VNĐ100 billion, double the investment rate if using a Chinese or domestic line with the same capacity.

It is necessary to have a team of technical personnel with high expertise as well as certain experience in the field of co-operation, and even to recruit additional suitable personnel. Only then can we co-operate, receive transfer and apply high technologies, thereby master technology and operate in large-scale production and business in the future. Our practical experience showed that when we co-operated to apply Japanese tra farming technology, the efficiency is very high if we have Japanese experts at the farm. But without their presence, the results had relatively large difference. The reason stemmed from the fact that at that time the personnel at the company were not qualified enough to transfer and independently operate the partner's technology.

For Vietnamese agricultural and food products, Japan is a very potential market. To exploit these potentials, Việt Nam needs to continue to improve production technology to ensure safety and traceability of its products to meet the strict quality standards of the Japanese market.

The investment prospects of Japanese businesses in Việt Nam are very bright and a big trend in the next 5 to 10 years. In the opposite direction, Việt Nam needs to continue to take advantage of favourable conditions to further promote trade into the Japanese market, thereby aiming to learn and exchange technology, and to be able to invest in some business segments in the Japanese market, such as IT, information services, telecommunications. — VNS