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VPBank breaks into Brand Finance’s top 250 value banks in 2021

February 23, 2021 by en.vietnamplus.vn

The Vietnam Prosperity Joint Stock Commercial Bank (VPBank) jumps 37 spots to enter the Brand Finance’s top 250 in rankings of the world’s most valuable banks in 2021. (Photo: VNA)

Hanoi (VNA) – The Vietnam Prosperity Joint Stock Commercial Bank ( VPBank ) has jumped 37 spots to enter the Brand Finance’s top 250 in rankings of the world’s most valuable banks in 2021.

According to the Brand Finance Banking 500 2021 ranking , VPBank ranked 243rd in banking brand value this year.

Its brand value grew 41 percent to 502 million USD this year from 354 million USD in 2019. It also represents a nine-fold increase against 2016 when the bank’s brand value was first evaluated at 56 million USD.

The 2021 ranking was calculated based on a brand’s market share, growth rate, property size, financial capacity, operating efficiency and prestige, said Lai Tien Manh from Brand Finance Vietnam.

In the face of COVID-19 that has taken a heavy toll on the global financial system, VPBank’s brand value growth is spectacular, he added.

Ending 2020, the bank’s total asset reached 419 trillion VND (nearly 18.2 billion USD), outstanding loans exceeded 320 trillion VND, while non-performing loan rate was kept at below 3 percent.

Eight other Vietnamese banks have also been named in the Brand Finance Banking 500, namely Agribank, Vietcombank, VietinBank, BIDV, Techcombank, MB, Sacombank and ACB./.

VNA

Adjustments to Tan Son Nhat airport planning greenlighted

February 24, 2021 by en.vietnamplus.vn

Tan Son Nhat International Airport (Photo: VNA)

HCM City (VNA) – The Ministry of Transport has approved adjustments to the Tan Son Nhat airport planning for the 2021-2030 period.

Under the planning, a terminal Doppler Weather Radar station will be built in an area of some 1,600 square metres to the northeast of the airport, while a multi-storey car park will be arranged at Terminal 3.

Regarding auxiliary facilities at the airport, adjustments are made to the location of the infight meal preparation areas and sewage treatment stations.

The Ministry of Transport asked the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam to review and update positions, scale and technologies used in the works so as to ensure the connection and uniform development with relevant infrastructure at the airport.

At present, Tan Son Nhat International Airport is the busiest airport in Vietnam. It is the biggest international aviation gate for the nation and centre for passenger and cargo transit in southern area./.

VNA

Manufacturing analytics in electronics industry – Pivot to quality in the “New Normal”

February 24, 2021 by www.vir.com.vn

Derek Ong, Electronic Industrial Software Solutions manager, Keysight Technologies

Squeezing every last drop of productivity from invested manufacturing equipment on the factory floor was the goal, and hence a lot of focus was on downtime and throughput. Predictive maintenance and asset utilisation are important business outcomes from any successful Industry 4.0 implementation.

Then COVID-19 happened. Other than the race to 5nm chips, 5G, and cloud computing, some sectors of the electronics manufacturing industry have seen a drastic drop in volume, leading to a surplus of production assets on the floor. For some, machines have idled. For others, COVID-19 has caused massive supply chain disruptions.

The necessary steps taken by governments around the globe to manage and halt the spread of this epidemic, has restricted movement of factory employees and subsequently lowered productivity and output. The trade situation between the US and China has forced manufacturers to shuffle operations for business continuity. There are everlasting shifts in manufacturing paradigms as a result of COVID-19. The new “norm” needs a rethink on how Industry 4.0 technology enablers will be used to address the new challenges.

Quality over quantity

Before COVID-19, Industry 4.0 adoption mostly revolved around asset utilisation. In the current situation, it may be better to ensure that every single manufactured product is of the highest quality the process allows. Due to shortages of materials and parts, rising logistics costs and restricted factory employees, manufacturers will have to minimise Return Merchandise Authorizations (RMA) even more than before. Better quality may also prove to be a compelling value differentiator to win more business.

Quality has always been one of the most important manufacturing performance metrics but rather than the usual narrative of adopting Industry 4.0 technologies such as big data analytics, AI, and the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIOT) to maximise asset utilisations, will need to pivot to adding more focus on improving the quality of the product being manufactured. Keeping machines up and running with minimal downtime gives less Return of Investment (ROI) if product recalls are happening or assets are loaded only half the time most days.

Manufacturing analytics is quickly rising to prominence

Qualitative and quantitative data on products – usually from test and measurement equipment on the floor – is an important source of insights for any big data analytics implementation. They allow engineers to maintain process parameters that yield the highest quality and they provide a real-time barometer of gross reproducibility and repeatability of equipment and processes, which is important for the predictable quality standard of the products.

This means that lower Cost-of-Poor-Quality (COPQ) is going to be something Industry 4.0 technology adoption has to address quickly.

Dangers of anomaly detection and things to look out for

Since the launch of Keysight’s PathWave Manufacturing Analytics in 2018, more manufacturers are embracing the new “normal” and using big data advanced analytics on test and measurement that are generated every second on the production floor.

A core fundamental analytics insight from the platform is being able to predict potential quality issues before they happen. The machine learning tool usually used to do this is around anomaly detection. We have seen a lot of examples of factories investing in setting up a generic big data platform and using publicly available open-source anomaly detection algorithms in production.

What is eventually evident is that these algorithms tend to be low in accuracy when dealing with test and measurement data, as opposed to continuous signals from sensors. This is what drove us to develop our own anomaly detection machine learning model at Keysight, which is tuned to provide the highest accuracy on test and measurement data from the floor.

We also identified “Alert Fatigue” in manufacturing industries that use anomaly detection as a predictor. Hundreds of thousands of measurements are taken in real-time in productionand a large number of anomalies are being alerted to operators or engineers every minute of the day. It is an impossible task for the users to decide which anomaly is most important and what are the most urgent actions to take.

Ultimately, this fatigue leads users to ignore the alerts, and the slow but sure demise of the entire advanced analytics project begins. If the right actions to prevent losses cannot be taken, then the ROI cannot be realised. This is important as, in order to make any investments in big data advanced analytics implementation in the factory worthwhile, it has to directly correlate with business outcomes.

Last year, we put together a team of data scientists and test and measurement experts in Keysight to develop an alert scoring machine learning model that works seamlessly with our anomaly detection algorithms to score measurement anomaly alerts in real-time, and we are planning the release of the new Alert Scoring feature in our upcoming PathWave Manufacturing Analytics 2.4.0 release in the spring of 2021. Alerts are labelled and sorted by the machine learning model as either high, medium, or low severity. The interpretation of the machine learning model of severity required supervised learning that Keysight’s test and measurement were able to provide.

With this first-in-industry alert scoring model, we were able to reduce the number of alerts sent to users for disposition by 90 per cent, in real-life testing. Instead of a hundred alerts, the engineer or operator will only receive ten of the most severe or important alerts.

The ability to combine domain knowledge and data science, sets companies such as Keysight, apart from generic big data platform partners, and we look forward to helping manufacturers achieve more tangible business outcomes with our 2021 roadmap.

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By Bich Thuy

Which sectors in Vietnam are dominated by Thai companies?

February 24, 2021 by e.vnexpress.net

In the last decade .their investments in Vietnam swelled by an average of 13 percent a year.

By the end of last year their total investment was only around $13 billion, not enough to put Thailand in the top five list, but still managed to have large market shares in several sectors by concentrating their investment in a handful of sectors.

In the retail sector, some leading supermarket chains are controlled by two Thai companies, Central Group and TCC Group.

Central Group, Thailand’s leading retailer, which belongs to the Chirathivat family, started off in Vietnam as a fashion merchandiser in 2012, distributing products from brands such as SuperSports, Crocs and New Balance.

In 2015, it acquired a 49 percent stake in electronics retailer Nguyen Kim through its subsidiary Power Buy.

In the same year, it bought out supermarket chain Lan Chi, which operates mainly in northern rural areas.

In 2016, it bought supermarket chain Big C Vietnam from France’s Casino Group for over $1 billion.

TCC Group, owned by the third richest man in Thailand, Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi, bought convenience store chain FamilyMart in 2012 and renamed it B’s mart.

In 2016, it bought wholesale chain Metro Cash & Carry Vietnam for €655 million ($796 million) and rebranded it as MM Mega Market Vietnam a year later.

TCC Group also dominates the beverage industry after acquiring a 53.59 percent stake in Vietnam’s top brewery, Sabeco, in 2017.

Fraser and Neave, Limited, a food and beverage company also owned by Sirivadhanabhakdi, is the biggest foreign shareholder in dairy behemoth Vinamilk.

Siam Cement Group (SCG), which dominates the packaging industry, recently signed an agreement to buy 70 percent of Duy Tan Plastics , the largest manufacturer of rigid plastic packaging products in Vietnam.

It now owns eight packaging companies in the country.

SCG has over 20 subsidiaries in the cement and building materials, chemicals and packaging industries.

In the livestock industry, Thailand’s largest private company Charoen Pokphand Group (CP) has been dominating the market for years.

In 1993, it established CP Livestock Co and later changed its name to CP Vietnam Corporation (CPV). In 2019, its revenues topped VND65.5 trillion, or 10 times that of the largest local rivals.

The solar energy sector has also attracted a number of Thai investors. Super Energy Corporation has been acquiring stakes in solar power plants in Ninh Thuan and An Giang provinces since 2018.

In March 2020, it announced plans to invest over $456 million in four solar plants with a total capacity of 750MW in Binh Phuoc Province.

Another Thai energy firm, Gulf Group, owns a 90 percent stake in two solar power plants, TTC 1 and TTC 2, in the southern province of Tay Ninh.

Thai companies have a geographical advantage over their counterparts from Europe, South Korea or Japan, while the two countries are culturally similar.

Thai investors’ strategy has been to target top companies in Vietnam or those with a competitive advantage, and take them over through mergers and acquisitions.

Coffee industry seeks to weather COVID-19 crisis

February 24, 2021 by vov.vn

Since Vietnam joined the International Coffee Organization (ICO), the coffee industry has experienced three crises, with the first occurring in 1991 when the ICO removed the quota system, causing the price of Arabica coffee to drop from US$4,000 per tonne to US$3,000 per tonne.

The second happened in 2000 when the price of Robusta coffee dropped to US$400 per tonne, and the third took place last year when the price fell by between US$1,300 and US$1,400.

Addressing this thorny issue, almost all coffee businesses have participated in e-commerce trading platforms, marketing the products in London and New York. Private firms have also moved to swiftly set up websites in order to sell their coffee products online, with on-demand home delivery services witnessing rapid growth.

Aside from serving customers at coffee shops, take-away services have also been added to allow customers to increase the efficiency of doing business whilst simultaneously ensuring COVID-19 preventive measures are in place.

Several businesses have also invested in processing roasted, ground, and instant coffee as a means of catering to consumers’ diverse tastes. They have taken advantage of opportunities in exporting coffee beans to markets that the country has signed free trade agreements with.

Besides foreign firms such as Nestle, Olam, Ca phe Ngon, and Tata, several Vietnamese enterprises including Tin Nghia Corporation, Intimex Group, An Thai Company, and Viet My Company have poured capital into intensive processing by building instant coffee factories with popular names.

Most notably, small roasting facilities that specialise in processing specialty coffee for a chain of between 10 and 20 coffee shops by using coffee machines have also witnessed rapid growth.

Furthermore, Trung Nguyen Legend has recently launched its official brand store on Amazon, marking an important step toward bringing local coffee to the world via e-commerce platforms.

With regards to this strategic move, a representative of Trung Nguyen Legend says despite initial encouraging results, there remains a long journey ahead for the group as it attempts to popularize its brand globally, adding that e-commerce channels will develop further in line with consumer trends.

Despite an array of challenges facing the global economy caused by COVID-19, the coffee industry aims to expand markets, participate in supermarket chains in foreign countries to distribute processed coffee, and accelerate the sale of coffee through the e-commerce system.

The industry will boost consumption of coffee products within the domestic market and maintain its position as the world’s second largest coffee producer and exporter, whilst increasing the added value of coffee beans and stabilising the lives of 640,000 coffee growing households nationwide.

‘Voltron’ spin-off comic brings back nostalgic memories, causes copyright concerns in Vietnam

September 10, 2019 by tuoitrenews.vn

A 27-year-old Vietnamese comic series based loosely on the popular ‘Voltron’ animated series of the 1980s is getting republished in Vietnam, stirring up excitement among a generation of readers while prompting worries about copyright infringement.

Dung si Hesman (Hero Hesman) was a 160-volume comic series by ‘adaption arist’ Hung Lan. It was published for the first time in Vietnam in 1992.

The sci-fi adventure superhero comic follows the protagonist, Hesman the robot, as he battles evil forces in the galaxy in a fictional future set in the 23rd century.

It was a huge hit among Vietnamese children and youth at a time when entertainment options were scarce in the absence of computer games and the Internet, with its circulation reaching 160,000 copies per volume at times.

Many Vietnamese millennials recall queuing up and fighting with other kids at local bookstores to rent the newest volumes of Dung si Hesman when they first got out.

Collecting spin-off items were also popular with young Hesman fans at the time.

A full collection of 160 'Dung si Hesman' volumes is seen in this photo by Erik Le.

A full collection of 160 ‘Dung si Hesman’ volumes is seen in this photo by Erik Le.

The nostalgic comic series is getting republished this summer by the Van Hoc (Literature) Publishing House and distributed by Hanoibooks, using scanned images of the original comic, the publisher and distributor said at a launch event on Sunday.

The first five volumes of the reprinted Dung si Hesman have already been available at bookstores nationwide since August.

The 2019 version will also run for 160 volumes like the original series, with an expected circulation of 2,000 copies per volume.

Its artist, Hung Lan, expressed his hope that the 2019 republication would appeal not only to nostalgic millennials but also to Vietnam’s Gen Z readers.

Artist Hung Lan (C) and fans pose for a photo at the launch event of the reprinted ‘Dung si Hesman’ comics. Photo: Mi Ly / Tuoi Tre

Artist Hung Lan (C) and fans pose for a photo at the launch event of the reprinted ‘Dung si Hesman’ comic. Photo: Mi Ly / Tuoi Tre

News of the reprint has caused fresh concerns about the comic’s violation of the copyrigh of the source material, an American animated series dating back to the 1980s.

Dung si Hesman is adapted by Hung Lan from Voltron: Defender of the Universe , an animated series produced by World Events Productions (WEP) in the U.S. from 1984 to 1985.

Hung Lan, 63, said he modeled his characters on those in the Voltron series and renamed the protagonist Hesman, a pun on ‘He is [a] man,’ to appeal to Vietnamese readers.

The Vietnamese artist added he only derived inspiration from Voltron for the first four volumes of Dung si Hesman , while the rest of the series are the results of his creativity at work.

The artist was referring to additional characters and original plots for more than 150 installments of the series.

A 'Voltron' artwork is seen in this photo. Photo: WEP

A ‘Voltron’ artwork is seen in this photo. Photo: WEP

A representative of Hanoibooks told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper it has worked solely with Hung Lan to have the comic republished and has not contacted WEP regarding copyright issues.

Hung Lan said he has always credited himself as an “adaptation artist” and not the “author” of the Hesman series.

He has only received “symbolic” royalties for his work, the man noted.

In a recent interview with Van Nghe Cong An newspaper, Lan underlined that right from the publication of the very first book in 1992, he required that the work be credited as “Hung Lan adapts from Voltron animated movie” on the comic book cover, never claiming he is the original author.

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