Talking to the press, Minister of Planning and Investment Vo Hong Phuc said: “In the past one year, especially since Vietnam has joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO), many big economic groups in the world have come to Vietnam with very large projects. Among them are new investors from the Middle East, such as Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, who have expressed the determination to invest billions of USD into Vietnam.

We expect that in the coming time those investors will become strategic investment partners of Vietnam. I think this is a rare opportunity for the country and we need to quickly grasp this opportunity. 

One of the moves proving the government’s determination to attract this source of investment is that the Prime Minister has instructed ministries, agencies and provinces to quickly carry out solutions to further draw foreign investment.

Could we ‘digest’ this amount of capital when administrative formalities are still stuck, infrastructure is overloaded and human resources are facing a shortage?

Administrative formalities in investment management have been decentralised to localities but in fact, some localities still cause investors problems.

To solve this problem, the Ministry of Planning and Investment has set up special task forces to assist provinces, especially with some large-scale projects. The Ministry will join hands with localities to speed up those projects.

This method has been applied for projects of Japan’s Matsushita group and recently Taiwan’s Foxconn. The Ministry is determined to do its best to help those groups invest in Vietnam as quickly as possible.

I think that investment promotion in this situation dictates that we have to follow each investor and each project to support them, not to call for investment in general. 

Investors complain that sources of manpower to build enterprises in the fields of hi-tech and high-grade service zones are in short supply. We have asked the Prime Minister to permit, in some cases, investors to bring workers to Vietnam to build specific works.

The new sources of investment aim at hi-tech and service projects so what do we have to do to welcome this source of capital?

Recently foreign investors have shifted their capital sources to industrial projects with high contents of technology instead of cheap labour as in the past. Among them are hi-tech groups like Compaq, Foxconn, Intel and Matsushita. We must have specific measures to attract this source of capital.

Representatives of those groups highly praise the young human resources of Vietnam, who have been trained. However, Vietnam needs to improve the contingent of vocational training teachers. Human resource training will be the key to attracting investment in hi-tech industries.

Some provinces are racing to attract foreign investment at any cost, accepting even projects that can cause pollution. Do we accept this situation?

I think selecting investment projects is very important. We don’t attract investment at any cost. We have to refuse projects that negatively impact the environment.

Competition to attract investment, in my opinion, is a good trend but all provinces must have the same policy on land, taxes, etc. We can’t let each province have its own policy. (VietNamNet Bridge –  Tuoi Tre)