James heat

The Hanoitimes – The performance of the real estate sector in Hanoi in the last three months of this year bodes well for 2021.

After the first nine months of stagnation due to Covid-19, Hanoi’s real estate market is expected to revive in the last quarter of this year, as local investors simultaneously launch a number of new projects to the market.

Hanoi real estate market to heat up in remaining months of 2020.

Some real estate experts said that the main reason for the heating of the real estate market of the capital was the recovery of the confidence of local investors thanks to the initial control of the epidemic. Such confidence faded due to the almost frozen market for fear of Covid-19 impacts and the superstitious business inertia of the seventh lunar month, also known as the Ghost month.

About 9,800 apartments built by Ecopark, Vingroup, Bitexco, and Masteri will be on sale in the last three months of the year, including more than 500 apartments of S-Premium Sky Oasis project – a 5-star tower in Ecopark; more than 700 luxury apartments of the Bitexco-owned Maxtric One project; thousands of apartments of Masteri Waterfront Ocean Park project.

In addition, the 6-month deposit rates of the four largest banks in the country fluctuate between only 3% and 4% per year. Low interest rates have led banks’ cash flows to be strongly channeled into the real estate sector in a context of low lending rates.

At the same time, the banks also cooperate with reputable developers to launch a series of attractive incentives for large projects with great liquidity.

In addition to favorable market conditions, the end of this year is the time for real estate groups to fulfill their business targets. It is also the peak time for remittances from abroad to Vietnam.

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected the economy and society, as well as people’s behavior and housing needs. Local experts suggested that home buyers prefer greener architecture and a safer living space. They tend to avoid crowded places or high-density residential buildings.

This trend is clearly shown in the “record” sales results of some projects delivered by Ecopark in 2020. Specifically, despite two waves of Covid-19, the group has sold out their products even during the introduction phase of the project.

The real estate sector in Hanoi in the last three months of this year bodes well for 2021, Ms. Nguyen Hoai An, director of CBRE Hanoi Branch predicted.

“International experts expect that Vietnam’s economic outlook in 2021 would be positive with an average growth rate of 7-8%. With such growth, the real estate market will flourish,” Ms. An said. The supply of the housing segment will be more diverse and that of the office and retail segments will continue to increase in 2021.”

Nguyen Van Viet, chairman of the Vietnam Beer-Alcohol-Beverage Association

What is your assessment of the beer, wine, and spirits market in the past year, along with the efforts of companies to take on new challenges?

The beer, wine, and spirits sector has undergone three decades of development. Many years ago it was one of the sectors bogged down in difficulties due to the chronic shortage of input materials, while foreign goods – particularly Chinese items – overwhelmed the domestic market. With the clear-sighted leadership of the government, the sector has gradually consolidated its footing and managed stable on-year growth.

From last January, the Law on Prevention and Control of Harms of Liquor and Beer Abuse came into force, and shortly after that was the enactment of a decree featuring heavier sanctions on drivers with alcohol on their breath. After the pandemic approached in March, the sector had almost been paralysed in the wake of these factors. Earlier last year, the tax authorities even delivered a forecast of a possible loss of more than VND30 trillion ($1.3 billion) in tax payments.

The sector’s contribution is significant given the fact that each year the alcoholic beverage sector contributes more than VND50 trillion ($2.2 billion) to the state coffers with its revenue doubling that level.

From the second quarter last year, the government began to deploy wide-ranging measures to support businesses. Although players in the sector were not direct beneficiaries of this support, improved performance by other sectors is a favour factor to their growth.

New circumstances have prompted businesses to adopt innovative measures in order to get ahead. Businesses launched products directly serving consumer needs, for instance the rollout of non-alcoholic drinks and fruit-based beverages that are selling well. These include Saigon Chill and Lac Viet from SABECO, HEINEKEN’s non-alcoholic offering, and Habeco’s canned draught beer.

Businesses have also diversified the sales format with an aggressive shift to online transactions. Consequently, the sector’s business rebooted sharply in the second and third quarters of 2020, even reaching revenues seen in the similar periods in 2019.

Over the whole year due to pandemic implications, the sector incurred about 15-16 per cent drop in revenue on-year. But with improvements in products and profits, other business targets had resumed to fairly satisfactory levels amid COVID-19 impacts.

This year continues to be a challenging one due to a combination of factors, especially the complex and unpredicted situation with the pandemic both domestically and globally. But with effective containment of COVID-19, I expect the sector’s performance this year here could be equal to, and even surpass, last year.

The sector is deemed a fertile land which is charming a slew of leading players, as the country integrates further into the global economy. What difficulties does this pose to its development?

The domestic market has certain advantages. For years, the government has been stimulating development with fairly open policies that provide the best conditions for foreign players. Key global players like AB InBev, HEINEKEN, Carlsberg, and Sapporo have all made forays into Vietnam. This has heated up competition in the domestic market that forces local players to improve themselves, including their management expertise to compete head-on with foreign players.

However, current management mechanisms are cause for some concern. For instance, in regards to equitisation plans at state-owned enterprises, there are roadmaps on stake sales to strategic investors or capital divestment. These plans sometime bother management and employees in crafting well-conceived development plans for the long haul. Otherwise, state-owned enterprises trusted with their proven capacity and well-conceived investment in improving consciousness, management skills, and finance can compete head-on with weighty foreign players.

Sustainability is one of the key pillars of business development. How have businesses in the sector embraced the trend?

Since the first years of open-door policy in Vietnam, many local businesses in the sector have made great efforts in investment to reach the level seen in the wider region and worldwide in terms of equipment, technology, management expertise, environmental protection, and sustainable development.

For instance, the personnel at the sector’s top players like SABECO possess very good management skills. They have a good grip on advanced management such as environmental management, or latest management methods.

Foreign players based in Vietnam also do a smart job in this field, leveraging their track record.

These top players, both from here and overseas, are not only good at production but also properly care for sustainability factors. They have all participated in national programmes on sustainable development, worked on concrete annual plans, and held top positions on Vietnam’s sustainability list.

There are many ways to make money in the 4.0 industrial era with the support of high technologies.

National programme to boost development of high technology

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has signed a decision on the national programme on high technology development to 2030, which aims to develop and master 20 prioritised technologies in different fields.

Digital transformation gives boost to development

Vietnam’s digital economic outlook has been seeded on a fertile and potential land with a high rate of Internet usage and a developing technological infrastructure.

The Hanoitimes – 2018 is expected to be an active year in the Hanoi retail market with a total of 157,000 sqm coming from eight under-development projects.

The Hanoitimes – Open data access from satellites and smartphones will build record of environmental change.

The Mekong River’s murky brown water has never hidden the threats from climate change, upstream hydropower dams, sediment starvation, and water level flows. But now a new Mekong Dams Monitor (MDM), bolstered by the Stimson Center’s Mekong Infrastructure Tracker, promises to add needed transparency to observe these ecological problems.

Mekong River: Source: James Borton and Nguyen Minh Quang

For nearly three decades, China has been building dams at breakneck speed on the upper Mekong reaches, alarming countries downstream over the threat of Beijing’s control of the water flow.

These open-access database tools offer data visibility and operations monitoring in present and future development projects, especially focused on China’s hydropower dams, enabling the US government and its think tank partners the ability to pinpoint potential Chinese security threats and changes in foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. For sure, 2020 has brought not only Covid-19 but also record droughts, posing a downstream humanitarian crisis.

The newly announced Monitor underscores the urgency for the adoption of science and technology in the form of remote sensing and satellite imagery directed at the reservoir levels at 13 dams along the river and an additional 15 tributary dams on the lower reaches. The collaborative project originates from the Stimson Center’s program Eyes on Earth Inc. a US research water consultancy and partly funded by the US State Department.

“Data and outputs published on Mekong Dam Monitor complement the ongoing research efforts of organizations in the Mekong, We hope to eventually pass leadership of the platform to collaborative partners in the region and establish lines of official collaboration with the Mekong River Commission,” claims Brian Eyler, a senior fellow at the Washington DC-based Stimson Center and author of Last Days of the Mighty Mekong .

The message behind these open-access database tools is that the US is encouraging the rise of voices and roles from civil society, i.e. grassroots geopolitical agents, who have the capacity and are able to peacefully, yet profoundly, undermine or challenge problematic foreign-owned development projects.

In addition, under the forces of today’s globalization 4.0, data and information appear to outweigh the non-renewable resources. The MDM, MIT and other Western-backed open-data platforms available in the Mekong region shed some light on how the U.S. and its partners are building diverse open sources of information that might constitute a bottom-up and true multi-stakeholder culture in the Mekong region. One question some may ask is in what ways the US agencies and think tanks use and assist international and local actors in employing these open-data platforms and for what purposes?

Broadly speaking, observation and promoting data visibility and transparency informs a localization policy – as part of the recent US Mekong policy. The key aim of this policy is to localize the US influence by supporting local actors to be proactive, more vocal and confident through “data visibility” and “training”. This is a non-confrontational approach that is highlighted in recent cooperation initiatives, including the Mekong-US Partnership.

A field trip to Mekong River. Source: James Borton and Nguyen Minh Quang

It is too early to evaluate the impacts of MDM, and other data-driven platforms in the Mekong region. However, these tools are believed to have a few weaknesses. First, given the traditional notion that state leads and all should follow, the accessibility to information in Mekong societies is different from the Western ones. Second, how to translate information from these data tools into simple languages understandable and interesting to the general audience and local peoples throughout the region remains unsettled. Third, data sources contributing to the tools might be questionable. Finally, as long as the information and dataset are widely recognized, they are not a reliable reference sources for policy-planning in the riparian governments.

Downstream in the Lower Mekong Delta, the Mekong Environment Forum in Can Tho, Vietnam has been engaging local farmers in citizen science or community-based science programs. The growth of grassroots participation in environmental issues, and in scientific research in general, has raised both local and international awareness of the transboundary ecosystem dangers.

MEF offers workshops that provide training in open access software for use in smartphones to address upstream environmental challenges. This is urgently needed since current science studies reveal that upstream dams are causing irreparable damage to the delta, altering fragile ecosystems and wrecking the livelihoods of the 2.3 million residents who farm along the Mekong river and the canals in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

The internet and new technologies, such as mobile apps for gathering data in the field and cloud storage tools, have made it possible for non-scientists to participate in the production of data and scientific knowledge. Open Development Mekong, a project of the Washington D.C.-based East West Management Institute, as well as the Mekong Water Data Initiative (Mekong Water.org), a program under the umbrella of the U.S.-backed Lower Mekong initiative, are among a few citizen-science platforms working to increase public awareness of the transboundary impacts of Mekong hydropower dams and other environmental challenges.

Science studies, coupled with grassroots participation, empowers communities and provincial government officials with data highlights that upstream hydro-infrastructure developments impact basin flow regime biology, bed and bank stability, biodiversity, fish productivity and sediment and nutrient transport.

The short-term impact of MDM and other data platforms could encourage increasing voices and involvement of non-state actors, such as NGO and grassroots movements, in local green politics. They are on-the-ground sources of information contributing data to the platforms, and change agents representing the US influence. The recent cancelation of some Chinese-backed development projects in Thailand and Myanmar is a visible example of this impact.

It’s encouraging that across the Mekong region more citizen scientists are working to contribute field-based datasets back to various platforms and introducing new policy recommendations and initiatives for a better Mekong future.

With the rising tide of public access to science information and data transparency, the launch of MDM could facilitate the enabling environment of participatory culture in the Mekong sub region where local voices are heard and have the potential to challenge foreign-owned controversial projects.

James Borton is a senior writer who has reported Southeast Asia for several decades and is co-founder of the Mekong Environment Forum. Nguyen Minh Quang is a Lecturer at Can Tho University and a co-founder of the Mekong Environment Forum.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by James Borton and Nguyen Minh Quang are of their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Hanoitimes.