Building materials makers struggle

Brick are produced by the Cao Bang Construction Materials Production Co. In the first eight months of this year, the building materials industry faced many challenges including higher input and production costs, slowing sales, and growing inventories, with some plants forced to terminate production. — VNA/VNS Photo Trong Dat

HA NOI — The Viet Nam Building Material Association has had some proposals to solve current difficulties in production and business for local building material enterprises, said an official in the association.

In the first eight months of this year, the building material industry faced many challenges, including price increases in input materials, high production costs, slow sales, high inventories and abrupt termination of production in some factories, said Tran Van Huynh, the association chairman.

Those difficulties were caused by high inflation, cuts in public funding, credit tightening policies, reductions in purchasing power and lulls in the real estate market, he said.

Therefore, the association had some proposals to support enterprises in solving their difficulties and putting an end to bankruptcy for building material producers, he said.

The Government should have policies on encouraging domestic construction projects to use locally produced building material products, instead of importing products from outside Viet Nam.

The Ministry of Construction should create a programme for importing and exporting building materials for Viet Nam and also promote exports of these products to potential markets in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

Now, the general plan of development for the building material industry in Viet Nam differed in many ways from similar plans in provinces, Huynh said, so the ministry should supply concrete guidance for the building material industry development at provinces following the national plan on development, especially major products such as cement, building pottery and ceramic products, building glass products and ceramic tiles.

The ministry should also work with banks to restructure debts of building material enterprises and then create favourable conditions for the enterprises in getting loans for production.

Co-operation between the ministry and the association should be promoted to have synchronous statistics on production and business of the building material industry and offer the association the chance to join the industry's development plan, he said.

Construction minister Trinh Dinh Dung agreed with those proposals and he said the enterprises should review them to see if there were any problems. — VNS