Five Vietnam retailers among top 500 Asia

Retail Asia Publishing and Eurominitor International (Asia) have ranked 500 best retailers in Asia Pacific region. Notably, the statistics on sales of Saigon Co.opmart made a surprise when it is equivalent to both BigC and Nguyen Kim.

Vietnam has five retailers in the list including Saigon Co.opmart ($1.1 billion revenue), BigC ($534 million), Saigon Jewellery JSC ($487 million) and Mobile World ($395 million).

As per information from Saigon Co.op, so far the system has more than 60 Co.op Food stores in HCM City and neighbouring provinces. In 2013, Saigon Co.op launched a new business model which is hypermarket.

Along with its partner of NTUC FairPrice (a cooperative unit in Singapore), the joint venture between Saigon Co.op and NTUC Fair Price will invest in the hypermarket chain business model. The first store is named Co. OpXtra Plus which specialises in both retail and wholesale in Thu Duc District, HCM City. It is expected that by 2015, there will have five Co. extra and Co. opXtra Plus hypermarkets and by 2020, the number of hypermarkets nationwide will increase to 15.

Vietnam’s retail market is witnessing the intense race among domestic and foreign invested enterprises.

Domestically, the following names can be mentioned: Ocean Retail under Ocean Group; Saigon Co.opmart; Fivimart system of Nhat Nam JSC.

For foreign retailers, Vietnam is a potential market with the presence of many large corporations such as Lotte Mart (South Korea); Takeshimaya, Aeon (Japan); Berli Jucker (Thai Lan – acquired from Metro). Wal-Mart (the U.S), Carrefour and Auchan (France) are looking for opportunities to set foot in Vietnam market.