Vinh Hoan, Vietnam’s top pangasius firm, has kicked off plans to extensively expand its farming and processing capacity with the goal of cementing its leading position in the pangasius industry.
The company announced on 29 August its board of directors has approved the formation of a new subsidiary called Vinh Phuoc Food Co. The subsidiary will be wholly owned by Vinh Hoan and has charter capital of VND 300 billion (USD 12.8 million, EUR 10.98 million).
Vinh Phuoc will help further expand the capacity of pangasius processing for Vinh Hoan, an official from Vinh Hoan’s Investor Relations Department told SeafoodSource on Thursday, 30 August.
The subsidiary, to be located in Chau Thanh district in the Mekong Delta province of Dong Thap, will have its own farms. The location of the new unit will enable it to expand farming areas near processing factories, minimize transport costs, and connect more easily with other facilities of the parent company in the region.
Vinh Hoan is headquartered in Cao Lanh City in Dong Thap. The company also runs Thanh Binh Dong Thap plant in the province’s Thanh Binh district.
Vinh Hoan spent VND 360 billion (USD 15.4 million, EUR 13.2 million) to buy a 100 percent stake in Thanh Binh Dong Thap in February last year.
Thanh Binh Dong Thap has two fillet processing factories, each with a designed capacity of 100 metric tons per day of raw material. Currently, only one factory is in operation. Vinh Hoan plans to raise the capacity of the operating factory to 150 metric tons (MT )per day by the end of 2018. The second factory is scheduled to be operational in 2019 with capacity of 150 MT per day. By 2020, Vinh Hoan will increase the total capacity of Thanh Binh Dong Thap to 400 MT per day, or 200 MT per day at each factory, according to the Vinh Hoan official.
Vinh Hoan’s capex this year was at VND 375 billion (USD 16 million, EUR 13.7 million), including VND 100 billion (USD 4.3 million, EUR 3.7 million) for the upgrade work at Thanh Binh Dong Thap, according to Vinh Hoan’s 2017 annual report, released earlier this year.
Vinh Hoan allocated a larger share of capex this year for a 220-hectare farm in Long An, a province located between Dong Thap and the country’s economic hub of Ho Chi Minh City. The farm includes a hatchery zone intended to provide sufficient fingerlings for grow-out fish farms. This, together with the application of innovations to its processes and machinery, will increase the self-supply ratio of Vinh Hoan by another 40 percent.
The company began construction at the Long An farm in April 2018. Currently,, fingerlings are farmed on an area of about 50 hectares. Vin Hoan expects to farm fingerlings and material pangasius on the whole 220 hectares, said the official.
Vinh Hoan plans to achieve consolidated revenue of VND 13 trillion (USD 556 million, EUR 477 million) by 2020, up from VND 8.17 trillion (USD 349 million, EUR 299 million) in 2017.
Photo courtesy of Vinh Hoan
