Socialist Republic of Vietnam

Ha Noi, Sept. 14 (VNA)-- The garment and textiles industry has registered an annual growth rate of between 20 and 25 percent in recent years, and provided almost 1.6 workers with jobs, not accouning for those in the cotton growing and sericulture areas.

Knitwear exports alone earn around USD 25 million every year, reports the Viet Nam Corporation of Textiles and Garments.

The success has largely resulted from the industry's intensive investment in technological upgrades and expansion of raw material areas such as cotton.

So far more than VND 4,000 billion has been invested in upgrading production chains in both the textiles and garment sectors, helping equip relevant entities with advanced technology.

The Thanh Cong Textiles Company, for example, has invested VND 700 billion in installing production chains of high-quality products for export at an yarn-spinning mill and a knitting factory.

The oldest Nam Dinh Textile Company has now fully upgraded its infrastructure system, totally replacing the 400 old weaving machines with knitting ones and expanding its production chains by another 100 knitting machines. It has also installed two automatic yarn-spinning lines.

The area under cotton cultivation nationwide almost doubled in the last four years to 22,600 ha in 2000 from 11,716 ha in 1997. The figure is expected to reach 30,000 ha this year.

Cotton production has increased an average of 16 percent a year in both the cultivated land area and in productivity.

However, domestic cotton production meets just 10 to 15 percent of demand which is estimated at around 30,000 tonnes of cotton a year.

To gradually attain self-sufficiency in raw materias, the garment and textile industry plans to invest more in producing synthetic silk and other by-products, in addition to efforts to further expand the areas under cotton and mulberry.

Its development masterplan calls for intensive training in personnel for much skills in relevant sciences and technology as well as in promoting cotton cultivation, especially at the grassroots level. And it aims at speeding up the transfer of technology and promoting know-how in the selection of investment projects and marketing down to the village level.

The industry also cares about the environment, planning to remove factories away from major cities and towns, and improvement of fashion designs so as to raise the competitiveness of the Viet Nam-made trade marks in the world markets.--VNA