Current issues and solution to improve Vietnam’s rice exports to Africa-Focusing on Cost Leadership and Third Party Logistics model

Abstract

Rice is important product in commodity category of Vietnam. Vietnam is among the top rice exporters in the globe and the country government aims to boost rice export to gain higher export revenue. There were evidences which were developed by other researchers to address the topic of about rice export activities of Vietnam. Evidences were developed with a broad range of research topics such as marketing strategies for Vietnamese rice producers. However, none of them focused on rice export to African countries. The primary objective of this dissertation is to identify current issues in Vietnam’s rice export activities to Africa’s countries and to propose solutions to fur-ther improve export performance. To resolve primary objective, in-depth interviews were utilized with the participation of 5 experts who are working for Vietnam Food Association (3 people) and Vietnam Logistics Associations (2 people) to join the inter-view sessions. . The interviews with these experts revealed 3 persistent problems and challenges. They are the choice of rice product for exporting in which African coun-tries do prefer lower quality products with lower price, the lack of cooperation be-tween Vietnamese governments and other governments in Africa, and fragmented African market that lead to different demand of rice import when global rice price changes. The key limitations of the competitive capabilities of Vietnam’s rice manufac-turers are export planning and stocking plan is underperformance compared to rice manufacturers in China or Thailand. Based on the findings, there are some recommen-dations are delivered to further improve rice export to African countries.