Dong Nai seeks solutions to increase investment attraction

Dong Nai (VNA) – Dong Nai province, an industrial hub in the southern region, is seeking measures to lure investment given a drop in FDI this year.

Director of the provincial Department of Planning and Investment Nguyen Huu Nguyen attributed the FDI reduction to bottlenecks in regulations stipulated by the laws on investment and land as well as those on public assets.

Dong Nai is working on its overall planning so that project licences have to wait for approval, he added.

While potential businesses cannot register their investments, local industrial parks are running out of land. As a result, a number of big foreign-funded projects earmarked for Dong Nai have been moved to neighbouring localities.  

The province targets to attract 1 billion USD in foreign capital this year. The early completion of its overall planning and addressing administrative barriers will play a key role in meeting the goal.

Vice Chairwoman of the provincial People's Committee Nguyen Thi Hoang said recently, local authorities joined a working session with industrial park infrastructure companies to learn about their difficulties and take timely measures to help remove them.

Dong Nai is also coordinating with ministries and branches to speed up the completion of procedures for setting up new industrial zones approved by the Prime Minister, which are expected to offer 7,000 more hectares of industrial land serving domestic- and foreign-funded projects, she noted.

Since the start of the year, many FDI corporations have come to the province looking for investment opportunities such as Aeon, De Heus and Pandora. Many of those already channeling capital into Dong Nai like Novaland, Hung Thinh, Dat Xanh, Sojitz, Canon, Shiseido and Mitsubishi said they will continue to expand their investment.

Park Hyun Bae, chairman of the Korean Business Association in Dong Nai, assessed that businesses from the Republic of Korea (RoK) are constantly pumping more money into the province, particularly in industry and energy.

He said the investors, however, faced a lack of large industrial land for lease.

Park recommended the province quickly invest in the infrastructure of expanded and new industrial parks to welcome the investment wave from the RoK.

In the first 10 months of this year, RoK investors pumped nearly 187 million USD in nine new projects at industrial parks in Dong Nai. Meanwhile, 26 RoK-funded projects in the province added a total of 118 million USD to their investment capital.

As of the beginning of November, Dong Nai was home to 426 RoK-invested projects worth more than 7.2 billion USD./.