Vietnam, with its strong economic growth and large population, is a potential market for Chile, President of the Federation of Chilean Industry (SOFOFA) Andres Concha told the press on Oct. 5.
Andres Concha said that SOFOFA will facilitate Chilean businesses to travel to Vietnam to study and seek for cooperative opportunities under a cooperation agreement between SOFOFA and the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI), which was signed during the freshly-ended visit to Chile by Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet.
He expressed his hope that the Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which is under negotiation between the two countries, would help boost Chile’s exports to Vietnam.
According to statistics from the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Export Promotion Bureau, ProChile, Vietnam exported over 96.6 million USD worth of goods to Chile in the first seven months of the year, representing a year-on-year increase of nearly 140.3 percent.
This sharp increase helped bring two-way trade in the seven-month period to 147.7 million USD, up 39.3 percent, despite Chile ’s exports to Vietnam decreasing by 22.4 percent to over 51 million USD during the period.
Vietnam mainly exports footwear, coffee, clothing, fibre and seafood to Chile while importing bronze, cod-liver oil, salmon, paper pulp, grapes and champagne from the Latin American country./.