The Ministry of Industry and Trade and Samsung Vietnam on February 22 signed a Memorandum of Understanding on cooperation in smart factory development.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated a number of trends such as automation, robotics and digital transformation towards the future of the supply chain of digitisation and self-operation. This trend promises huge benefits such as maintaining and stabilising production in the context of the pandemic, increasing productivity, saving costs, optimising resources.

However, the digitalisation application has seen challenges due to the lack of correct information and understanding about digital transformation in production, as well as the lack of resources.

On that basis, the two sides have studied and built a cooperation project to develop Smart Factory in Vietnam with the goal of training 100 Vietnamese experts and assisting in consulting and improving 50 businesses to apply Smart Factory in two years in order to improve the expertise of the team of consultants, improve the production operation capacity on the information technology platform of the enterprise.

Participating in the programme, the consultants will be trained for 12 weeks to improve knowledge and skills to set up smart factories.

Speaking at the ceremony, Minister of Industry and Trade Nguyen Hong Dien said: “I think the above cooperation project is a methodical, practical and important training programme to elevate Vietnam's industry in the context of the 4.0 industrial revolution. I hope that the students and businesses participating in the project will gain a lot of useful knowledge as well as necessary skills to help Vietnamese businesses meet domestic demand and enhance competitiveness in the global value chain.”

Choi Joo Ho, President of the Samsung Vietnam Complex, said “In this project, experts from Samsung Korea in the field of smart factories will participate in direct instruction at the factories of participating enterprises, so I hope that this support will be a premise for businesses to raise their capacity to a new level. We respectfully request the Vietnamese Government to continue to pay attention to and support in terms of policies so that Vietnamese enterprises that are competitive after being trained will have the opportunity to contribute to the development of Vietnam's support industries. At the same time, I hope that the representatives of businesses participating in this project will actively promote their leadership and high responsibility, and make maximum efforts to implement the project to achieve the highest results.”

The smart factory cooperation project is the latest programme in a series of innovative consulting activities for Vietnamese businesses and training Vietnamese experts to effectively replicate, strengthen synergy and continue to strengthen supporting industry development activities.

The cooperation has again affirmed Samsung Vietnam’s strong commitment to Vietnam. Last week, Thai Nguyen province granted an adjusted Investment Registration Certificate to Samsung Electro-Mechanics Vietnam (SEMV) to further invest 920 million USD in the province, lifting the plant’s total capital to around 2.27 billion USD./.