VietNamNet Bridge - As Kinh Do has sold its sweets manufacturing division to the US firm Mondelez, Vietnam has no company that can compete with foreign manufacturers in the sweets market.

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The revenue of some sweets manufacturers in 2014

Sweets manufacturing is considered a profitable and safe business field. The top five manufacturers in the field all report annual turnover of over VND1 trillion.

Kinh Do Group reportedly pocketed VND800 billion from making moon cakes after every production season which lasts two months in mid-year.

A report of BMI, a market survey firm, showed that the sweets industry in 2014 had turnover of VND27 trillion, witnessing the growth rate of 10.65 percent over 2013.

An analysis of CafeF showed that at least seven sweets manufacturers have annual revenue exceeding the VND1 trillion threshold, including Kinh Do (now Kinh Do Binh Duong), Orion Food Vina, Huu Nghi, Perfetti Van Melle, Phu Truong Quoc Te (Richfield), Bibica and Liwayway (Oishi).

The total turnover of the enterprises is about VND15 trillion a year, which is equal to half of the total turnover of the whole industry.

In the eyes of Vietnamese consumers, import sweets, and sweets made by foreign invested enterprises in Vietnam are better than domestic products. This partially explains why foreign brands have bigger pieces of the domestic sweets cake.

As Kinh Do has sold its sweets manufacturing division to the US firm Mondelez, Vietnam has no company that can compete with foreign manufacturers in the sweets market.
Inbisco Vietnam, an import company, has been making every efforts to boost the sale of foreign products in the Vietnamese market. Phu Truong Quoc Te is a Vietnamese company, but also focuses on distributing foreign Mars’ products, such as M&M, Doublemint and Cool Air.

There are numerous Vietnamese sweets companies, namely Kinh Do, Huu Nghi, Bibica, Hai Ha, Hai Chau and Pham Nguyen. However, since July 2015, when Kinh Do sold 80 percent of its Kinh Do Binh Duong, the group’s sweets manufacturing division, to Mondelez, the domestic market has been dominated by foreign manufacturers.

In fact, Mondelez had been eyeing the Vietnamese market for many years before it took over Kinh Do Binh Duong. 

Analysts once predicted that the domestic market would entirely be swallowed by foreign manufacturers once Lotte, the big shark from South Korea, finished its plan to take over Bibica.

However, this has not come true. Lotte’s plan has failed because of the appearance of the group of shareholders headed by Nguyen Duy Hung. The ownership ratio in Bibica is now in balance with each of Lotte and PAN Group, holding over 40 percent of Bibica’s stakes.

Kinh Do reaped big fruit from sweets manufacturing for many years. The total profits of six companies, namely Orion, Perfetti Van Melle, Bibica, Hai Ha, Huu Nghi and Hai Chau, in 2014 in total was still lower than Kinh Do’s profit by VND100 billion.


NCDT