Sponsored by our partner Autodesk Foundation, our Junior Project Manager is just back from her field trip to Vietnam for the second phase of the Vietnam Market Access Program (VMAP+), a program supported by the Finnish Innovation Partnership Program (IPP). Here are her impressions and interesting approach of Vietnam SME’s interested in GoSol solutions.
It was an amazing journey in the position of Junior Project Manager Vietnam that I want to share with you. During Summer 2018, the main aims of my travel to Vietnam was to represent our company GoSol to the potential partners and do the market identification through community visits.
With the network GoSol is starting to have from VMAP since last year, this time I had the chance to meet potential partners who are interested in developing semi-industrial applications as well as humanitarian projects with us. In addition, for our educational plan, I met the representative from the Ho Chi Minh University of Technology to consider our cooperation in educational training and raising local awareness about environmental protection.
Thanks to the help of a local partner, the very dynamic NGO “Ben Tre’s Young Creative Group”, I got a successful field trip to Ben Tre Province, met the local people who are in need of our clean solar technology and discussed with the local government about local trademark and enterprise development.
One of the most interesting communities that I have visited is the Rice paper craft village. They produced 1000 rice papers per day from 40 kg of rice. They are burning charcoal and wood to steam the rice paper and then dry it under the sun. Mrs. Huyen, the owner of one small business said: “I wish to replace my current fuel burning to save money and have a temperature-controlled solution that gets rid of the insects with the old sun-drying method, fastens the production and produces a better quality product”. GoSol obviously fits their need.
Moreover, because they are a traditional craft village and want to boost the local tourism, they hope our drying machines to be visible from outside for the tourists to see their sustainable production. They were very excited about our technology and I was also impressed by their entrepreneur spirit.
Another fascinating community I visited is the “Drying fish village”. Vietnam has a long sea border, so seafood products are very popular with large capacity which leads to the problem of product conservation. In this village, there are 40-50 households drying fish. One small household production can dry 200-500kg of fish per day so overall is a massive amount. It takes 6 to 8 hours to dry the fish outside. Local people are also eager to change their old method of direct sun-drying with many constraints in term of product quality to our faster solar drying technique. Mr. Hong, the owner of one household production said: “We have large space for drying, large capacities and don’t have labour, only family production so our current drying method is very hard work. Therefor we are really in need for drying ovens”.
Vietnam not only has a high need for drying applications, but also very much for the process of roasting coffee. I had the chance to visit a semi-industrial coffee roasting factory from “Mr. Chi Coffee” and to have a great discussion with the owner for our further cooperation for solar roasted coffee trademark in Vietnam.
With our past experience through the fish drying project, GoSol is confident that our solar oven can be their best free clean energy and adaptable solution.
In her next post, Tran will present how GoSol technology can be useful for a specific niche market.
