Vietnam Overseas

A Mekong Delta province has awarded two overseas Vietnamese with merit awards to honor their contributions to their home province of Kien Giang.

French citizen Thai Thanh Luu of Ha Tien has donated a total of VND12 billion (US$750,000) to the Kien Giang Polyclinic, according to the provincial People’s Committee office. The sum was from his own money and donations from other the French community. This July, US resident Ho Van Ut was praised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for valuable gifts to his home district of Hon Dat. In 2006, he spent $187,500 of his own money alongside $62,500 in community collections to fund the construction of bridges in Hon Dat’s rural villages. In 2007, he and a group of other givers donated an additional $500,000 for bridge construction.

Posted and reported by Thanh Dung – Translated by Minh Phat

From zero to having assets worth hundreds of millions US dollar and joining the billionaire club of New Zealand in the near future, that’s the story of a Vietnamese real estate trader in Manukau, New Zealand.

This Vietnamese New Zealand man, 38, earns money from real estate and horseracing and he was recently named on the list of the richest men in New Zealand by National Business Review magazine.

The man, Don Ha, left Vietnam at the age of nine after the Vietnam War. His family went to Hong Kong before settling in New Zealand in 1980.

Don Ha’s family opened a bakery, which became a chain of bakeries in the southern part of Auckland several years later. However, Don Ha didn’t work at his parents’ bakery but became an importer of shoes and belts from Asian countries.

In 1994, he began to get involved in real estate business. So far, he has sold real estate works worth more than $200 million in the southern part of Auckland.

“I want to create a model and I hope any person who is hard-working like me will gain the same results. I want to achieve success of 10, 20 and 100 times more than what I have now,” Don Ha said.

He has recently become involved in horseracing business. At a national auction held in January 2007, he surprised the horseracing circle in New Zealand by buying a young racing horse at a price of $2 million.

Don Ha is developing a horse training establishment in Pukehole. “My ambition is entering the nation’s top ten businessmen in the horseracing business,” he said.

Don Ha is expected to enter the billionaire club of New Zealand very soon, which currently has five individual members only.

“We consider him a billionaire because he currently has around $800 million and other reports say that he is even richer,” said Brett Thompson of National Business Review magazine.

Posted September 6, 2007, Source: VietNamNet/One News

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung on August 17 gave the nod to a new regulation that will grant visa exemptions to Overseas Vietnamese from September 1.

Ethnically Vietnamese people that hold foreign passports and foreign nationals who are their husbands, wives and children will benefit from the new policy.

A certificate must be obtained by the passport holders for the exemption to be utilized. The certificate will be valid for five years. Overseas Vietnamese will be granted a maximum of 90-day length of stay with extensions available inside the country.

In order to be granted visa exemption certificates at Vietnamese representative offices abroad, overseas Vietnamese need to submit one of three following documents: a document that proves they are ethnically Vietnamese; a guarantee by overseas Vietnamese associations based in the country where they are residents of or by a Vietnamese citizen; and a document by authorized foreign agencies certifying that they are ethnically Vietnamese.

Husbands, wives and children of Vietnamese people living abroad will also need to submit documents that prove their relationship to the Vietnamese member of their immediate family.

Expecting a rush on representative offices abroad, the Committee for Overseas Vietnamese has sent 200,000 visa exemption certificates to Vietnamese embassies overseas.

The move to exempt visas for overseas Vietnamese is part of the Government’s efforts to speed up the implementation of the Politburo’s Resolution No. 36 on tasks relating to overseas Vietnamese. The visas exemption policy was announced by President Nguyen Minh Triet during his visit to the US on June this year.

According to the Committee for Overseas Vietnamese, there are currently close to three million overseas Vietnamese who have mostly settled in the US, France, Australia and Canada. Around 500,000 overseas Vietnamese return to Viet Nam each year.

(Source: VNA – Posted August 19, 2007)

Viet Nam’s rich supply of labor export resources is in drastic need of improvement if the country wants to compete with other developing countries in the overseas market.

In the past ten years Viet Nam has sent a large number of workers to a variety of developed countries. Currently, around 400,000 people are working in some 40 countries and territories abroad.

In the first half of the year alone, the country sent around 40,000 people, accounting for 50.78 per cent of the target number for the whole year. Of these, many had the chance to work in new markets such as Qatar (Middle East), Macau, Brunei, Singapore, Australia, and Canada.

However, despite this positive outlook, according to the current rate of 6,000 workers sent abroad per month, it is unlikely that Viet Nam will meet its target of 80,000 workers for the year.

According to director of Airserco Labor Export Center, Nguyen Xuan Vui, there are several reasons for this gloomy prediction. Most prominent among these is the fact that labor import markets, especially in English speaking countries, now impose quite high requirements on worker’s skills, discipline and knowledge of foreign languages.

In general, Vietnamese workers meet the requirements of foreign employers on a basic level. However, in some countries such as Malaysia and the Middle East, there have been complaints about a lack of discipline amongst male workers from Viet Nam.

“Despite the fact that this is an open market for Viet Nam, Islamic countries with quite strict regulations are not likely to accept the lack of awareness and discipline of Vietnamese workers,” Director of the Labor Export, Trading and Tourism Joint-stock Company, Tran Luc, said.

Though demand for unskilled labor and experts is quite high in the Middle East, the limitation of Vietnamese workers in physical strength and language abilities means they often receive lower incomes in comparison with workers from other countries like Indonesia or the Philippines.

To combat this problem, it is vital that relevant bodies co-operate with investors in establishing vocational schools in Viet Nam to train workers in the specific skills they need to be competitive in this market.

According to Minister Nguyen Thi Hang, Viet Nam urgently needs to enhance the skills and knowledge of its workers. This is especially important if the country wants to achieve its exports targets.

Rendering the solution all the more imperative, the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs has estimated that 320,000 people will be sent to work abroad in the period 2007-2010.

In addition to boosting the number of skilled guest laborers to 65 per cent, the Ministry has also set goals to send 100,000 laborers per year from 2010. Each year after 2015 the country would see more than 1 million Vietnamese people working abroad, said Hang. — VNA (posted July 3, 2007)