Vingroup has produced body thermometers for COVID-19 at much lower cost than others available on the market. — Photo courtesy of Vingroup

HÀ NỘI — Vingroup announced it would produce ventilators and body thermometers to serve the domestic market on April 3. It will also give the Ministry of Health (MoH) 5,000 non-invasive ventilators to treat COVID-19 patients in Việt Nam.

For production, Vingroup signed a license agreement with US-based Medtronic to use their design for the PB560 ventilator, and also began researching a non-invasive ventilator based on the community-shared design by MIT University.

The group said the ventilators’ components will be sourced externally and internally.

Vice chairwoman of the group Lê Thị Thu Thuỷ said: “Vingroup has an advantage of having both the VinFast automobile factory and VinSmart electronics factory. So, we can manufacture both large and mechanical parts as well as rare, smaller parts at the same time.”

She also said they had excellent design engineers to transform the conceptual and 2D designs into detailed and complete designs required by the manufacturers.

It is expected that the first batches of components for the non-invasive ventilator will arrive in two weeks and other batches of parts will arrive in another two weeks.

The group said with enough components, it can produce the ventilators in one day and transfer them to the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Planning and Technology for appraisal and quality tests before they are distributed to health facilities nationwide.

The group has successfully tested and produced body thermometers. The group said the cost of components for the thermometers was VNĐ16 million, much lower than other body temperature machines on the market.

The group estimated the component cost for a non-invasive ventilator at about VNĐ22 million and for an invasive ventilator at VNĐ160 million.

CEO of the group, Nguyễn Việt Quang, said: “We expect to supply these devices to MoH at the cost of components. We won’t include the costs of transportation, labour, production and other costs into the price.”

Quang said the group will give MoH 5,000 non-invasive ventilators to treat COVID-19 patients in Việt Nam.

He added: “With the capacity of VinFast and VinSmart, the group can produce up to 45,000 non-invasive ventilators and 10,000 invasive ventilators per month and support other manufacturers around the world to process the equipment for the ventilators.” — VNS