Vietnam is taking some specific measures to strengthen export to China, in a move to increase export turnovers from 3.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2007 to 4 billion dollars in 2008, some 5.4 billion dollars in 2010 and 11.1 billion dollars in 2015, according to latest plan made by the Vietnamese Ministry of Industry and Commerce.

The ministry will offer domestic enterprises more precise consultations and assessments about the Chinese market, and ask them to regard it as a potential market. It is advising the enterprises to intensify export of seafood, tropical fruits and vegetables, cashew nuts, rice, sliced manioc and cassava, electric wires and cables, and wood-based imitation antiques.

The ministry is also instructing local firms to do business with well-performing Chinese companies in a long-term and stable manner, and proposing relevant ministries and sectors give assistance to enterprises which engage in producing and trading large volumes of goods for the Chinese market and improve quarantine operations at border gates to facilitate export.

Vietnamese firms are trying to gain bigger export turnovers by exporting more high-value products to China. The state-owned Vietnam Rubber Corporation will limit the export of unprocessed latex to the Chinese market, and intensify the export of semi- processed or processed rubber items instead, while local seafood and woodwork enterprises are penetrating into major Chinese cities.

Vietnamese seafood exporters have made plans on selling more products to China's southwestern localities, instead of focusing too much on the United States and the European Union (EU), and local woodwork producers will try to export more imitation antiques to the two Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai.

To cope with smaller export earnings of tropical fruits and vegetables exported to China in recent years due to fiercer competition from Thai counterparts, some Vietnamese enterprises are boosting export of special products having high-quality and fine packages, including dragon fruits, coconuts, longans, water melons, bananas and litchis.

Vietnam will further tap companies owned by Chinese-Vietnamese people, and foreign retailers that purchase Vietnamese commodities and then sell them at their supermarkets in China. The country will also accelerate trade and investment promotion at home and abroad targeting major Chinese traders and investors who produce goods in Vietnam and export them to China and other countries, and establish enterprises designated for displaying and selling local products in such Chinese cities as Shanghai, Guangzhou and Nanning.

Realizing that its seven northern provinces bordering China have gain increasingly bigger export turnovers with the neighbor country, Vietnam has mapped out a plan to foster industries, especially small-scale ones, and handicraft in the seven localities.

Under the plan on developing industries of the provinces of Dien Bien, Lai Chau, Lao Cai, Ha Giang, Cao Bang, Lang Son and Quang Ninh to 2010 recently approved by the ministry, Vietnam is focusing on promoting mineral exploitation, agricultural and forest product processing, and production of construction materials, fertilizers and chemicals with top priority given to fields which involve in processing, producing and packaging items for export to China.

Besides China, Vietnam is trying to facilitate export to other members of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations ( ASEAN), Japan, the United States, and the EU.