Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Overseas investment totals $730m in first nine months

06 Oct, 2010

Viettel advertises its Metfone service on the outskirts of Sihanuokville in Cambodia. Authorities licensed 90 overseas investment projects worth $637 million in the first nine months of this year. — VNA/VNS Photo Ngoc Ha

Viettel advertises its Metfone service on the outskirts of Sihanuokville in Cambodia. Authorities licensed 90 overseas investment projects worth $637 million in the first nine months of this year. — VNA/VNS Photo Ngoc Ha

HA NOI — In the first nine months of the year, the Foreign Investment Agency (FIA) licensed roughly 90 overseas investment projects totalling more than US$637 million and gave permission for 25 existing projects to raise their capital by $92 million, according to FIA statistics.

The FIA said besides the traditional markets of Laos and Cambodia, Vietnamese businesses this year also poured significant investment into Russia, Malaysia, Algeria, the US and Cuba.

Vietnamese businesses have so far invested more than $8 billion in more than 500 overseas projects.

Mining topped the list of Vietnamese foreign investment to date, totalling $3.58 billion. The service and agro-forestry-fishery industries followed with $1.12 billion and nearly $985 million, respectively.

Apart from big names such as the Hoang Anh Gia Lai Group, the Sai Gon Thuong Tin Joint Stock Commercial Bank (Sacombank), the Bank for Investment and Development of Viet Nam (BIDV) and the Army Telecoms Corporation (Viettel), several more enterprises have begun to invest overseas.

The Truong Thanh Furniture Corporation recently signed a MoU with a South African partner to build a $30 million processing plant in the city of Umshwathi.

It also plans to plant 10,000ha of trees in South Africa's Kwazulu Natal province.

"The important thing is not just quantity but the quality of projects and how effective they are, especially in helping local exporters," said deputy director of the FIA's Overseas Investment Division Vu Van Chung.

To facilitate overseas investment, the FIA is collecting feedback from businesses for the amendment of Decree 78/2006/ND-CP, which provides enterprises with guidelines on how to prepare an application to speed up investment registration procedures, Chung said. — VNS

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