Da Nang’s industrial parks have so far this year attracted hundreds of businesses to invest in the city, including 130 which are FDI ones.  This is mainly attributed to the city’s favourable investment environment, its abundant labour force, and its convenient transportation.

Amongst the FDI businesses operating in the city, the Vietnam Brewery Limited (VBL) has poured the highest investment capital into the city, with 222.8 million USD in total, whilst the Foster Electric Company has recruited the largest number of employees with more than 9,000.  Meanwhile, although the Mabuchi Motor and Daiwa companies have not poured so much investment capital into the city, their products hold between 60% and 80% of the world’s market share.

Newly-assembled Nissan cars at the TCIE Vietnam Company in the Hoa Khanh IP

However, there have not as yet been any large-scale businesses investing in the city.  The main reason seems to be that the consumption of goods in the central region is much lower than in the northern and southern regions.  In addition, the majority of the city’s human resources have not met the recruitment requirements of the local FDI businesses.  As a result, many local FDI businesses have to spend a lot of money training their newly-recruited employees.  Therefore, foreign investors in the city put their focus on investing only in sectors which require a short training period for their employees in order to save costs. 

In fact, over recent years Da Nang’s authorities have not granted business licences to projects worth billions of USD because they do not meet the city’s requirements for environmental protection and other related reasons.  Therefore, the success of Da Nang in attracting FDI projects might be assessed based on the effective operation of the existing FDI businesses in accordance with the city’s sustainable development strategies instead of increasing the number of projects invested by large-scale businesses.