VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnam’s automobile industry, as part of its development strategy, is focusing on manufacturing trucks.

However, Vietnamese transport firms cannot buy Vietnam-made trucks for their fleets.

The owner of a transportation firm in Hanoi complained that he still cannot buy a heavy truck, though he has been looking for it for the last two months.

He said that there were not many choices in the market.

“You have to choose either South Korean vehicles, which are good and expensive, and Chinese, which are cheap and not good,” he said.

A salesman at Hoang Huy Group, a business in Hai Phong City specializing in assembling and trading China’s Dongfeng-brand vehicles, declined to give information about selling prices via telephone.

He asked the buyer to come directly to the workshop to discuss the prices.

The salesman had his reasons to do this: the prices of Chinese vehicles have been fluctuating over the last few years.

It is because Dongfeng vehicles of the same models have different prices levels, depending on the vehicle parts used.

“The products made last year are different from those made this year because the assembled components have different qualities,” he explained.

Chinese vehicle prices are on the rise, he said, because the demand has been increasing since the day the Ministry of Transport began tightening control over vehicle loads on roads.

According to the General Department of Customs (GDC), in 2014 alone, Vietnam imported 13,805 vehicles under the mode of complete built units (CBU), most of which were trucks from China, worth $538 million.

The imports from China in 2014 were three times higher than in 2013.

As such, China has become the biggest truck supplier for Vietnam, with imports from China accounting for 34 percent of import turnover and 20 percent of the total number of imported vehicles.

The director of a transportation firm in Hai Phong City said most of the container trailers and heavy trucks in Vietnam are sourced from China.

Chinese trucks do not sell well because of high quality. One driver said Chinese products are much worse than South Korean products, while their quality is unstable.

But Vietnamese still buy Chinese trucks despite their low quality because they are cheaper, and spare parts are available in the domestic market.

Chinese trucks also have more fuel savings than South Korean trucks. Hundreds of thousands of dong worth of expenses on fuel can be saved, for example, for a distance of 400 kilometers, with the use of Chinese trucks.

Vietnamese automobile manufacturers, who understand the market well, dream of making trucks that are cheap and good enough to satisfy transportation firms. However, they continue to be stymied because of the competition.

K. chi