The department’s statisticsshowed 922 vehicles were imported during June 1-7, tripling the number in theprevious week (May 25-31), with a total value of 21.5 million USD.
Of the importedvehicles, 647 were under nine-seat cars, accounting for 70.2 percent andcosting nearly 13.8 million USD, with 546 coming from Thailand. Only 36vehicles were shipped from China, and the rest were from Germany, Sweden,Japan, Canada and the US.
Trucks of all kinds numbered266 worth nearly 6.6 million USD, 246 of which were from Thailand and 20 fromRussia. They were brought to Vietnam through Hai Phong and Ho Chi Minh CityPorts.
The customs alsoreported that nearly 41.7 million USD were spent on spare part imports duringthe reviewed period, a slight rise over the previous week. The parts werebought mostly from Japan (9.9 million USD), China (8.8 million USD) andThailand (8.1 million USD).
Car import has been tightened since early this year when theGovernment’s Decree 116 on car manufacturing, assembly, importation andwarranty offering - came into effect from January 1, 2018.
The decree requires importers to get vehicle type approval (VTA)certification when importing cars from the authorities of the importer country.Businesses can be granted VTA certification when importing vehicles fromThailand and Indonesia; however, with vehicles imported from Japan, they cannotobtain it as the Japanese Government doesn’t grant such certification forexported vehicles.
So far only two companies - Honda and GM - have been qualified to importcars for distribution at a significantly lower cost.
Cars imported from Europe ingeneral and from Germany in particular, which are subject to a 70 percentimport tax, are also heavily affected by the new regulations of Decree 116. Asa result there has not been any model of Audi, BMW or Volkswagen that has beenimported to serve domestic consumers so far this year.
The difficulties of importingvehicles to Vietnam has led to a scarcity of supply, thus companies assemblingcars domestically, which are given a 5 percent reduction to special consumptiontax, and enjoy no import duty tax, are beginning to take advantage of thesituation by raising prices.-VNA