The Government was setting goal of having 1.2-1.5 million enterprises by 2025 over the expectation that the business climate kept improving. — Photo baochinhphu.vn

HÀ NỘI — It is important to improve the capacity of enterprises and not just develop them in term of quantity, experts said.

The General Statistics Office (GSO) said there were about 810,000 firms by the end of last year, missing the Government’s target of one million.

But the Government still has set the goal of 1.2-1.5 million enterprises by 2025 based on the fact that the business climate kept improving.

Statistics from the Ministry of Planning and Investment pointed out that the number of enterprises in Việt Nam increased by 10.5 per cent in the 2016-19 period with around 100,000 new firms launching every year, twice as high as the 2011-15 period. However, most were of small and medium sizes.

GSO’s Director Nguyễn Thị Hương said the COVID-19 pandemic was significantly affecting the socio-economic development and health of enterprises.

Research by the Ministry of Planning and Investment pointed that the health of the Vietnamese enterprises was at the most pessimistic level in recent years. The number of new firms established in 2020 was 2.3 per cent lower than 2019 and the total number of employees of new firms was 16.9 per cent lower.

Economic expert Ngô Trí Long said Việt Nam is looking to develop big enterprises to lead the economy. However he noted that small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) played a very important role but the policies introduced to support SMEs were proved not to work effectively as expected. For example, the SMEs support funds did not operate efficiently as it remained difficult for firms to get accessed to financial supports from these funds.

Long said that the support policies for SMEs must be more practical.

A weakness of Vietnamese enterprises was that most of them failed to participate in the global value chain, adding that it was critical for enterprises to participate in global value chain to develop in the integration process.

He said that support policies should be introduced for enterprises which were selected to be capable of engaging in the global value chains.

Early this year, the Government assigned the Ministry of Planning and Investment to develop a resolution about developing enterprises in 2021-2025 with a vision to 2030 which aimed to have 1.5 million firms by 2025, 15 to 20 of which are private and have capitalisation of more than US$1 billion.

To achieve this goal, there must be around 100,000 – 150,000 new firms every year in the next five years or the number of enterprises must increase around 12-14 per cent per year.

According to Tô Hoài Nam, Deputy President of the Việt Nam Association of SMEs said that while the quality of enterprises was the top concern, it was also important to develop a big enough enterprise community to create breakthroughs.

Nam said that it was critical to create a favourable business environment to achieve the goal in the next five-year period, adding that barriers related to administrative procedures must be removed and compliance costs reduced for firms. — VNS