Up to 20 percent of Vietnamese textile and garment enterprises will face difficulties and risk of bankruptcy after Vietnam joins the World Trade Organization (WTO), hopefully late this year, local newspaper Saigon Liberation reported Monday.

Chairman of the Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association Le Quoc An was quoted by the newspaper as saying that the risk is high as half of a total 2,000 local textile and garment enterprises do outsourcing for foreign firms and the rest produce items under their foreign customers' designs and materials appointed by them.

Enterprises, which have yet to develop their own trademarks, and have stable markets, loyal customers and suitable ways of tapping human resources, will encounter the risk, he said.

The local firms should resort to stable workforce with cheap labor cost, improve capacity of design, marketing and management, and intensify information technology application into production and sale, especially e-commerce.

Vietnam posted textile and garment export turnovers of over 3.9 billion U.S. dollars in the first eight months of this year, a year-on-year surge of 28.2 percent. It is estimated to reap 5.5 billion dollars from exporting the products, mainly to the European Union and the United States in 2006, up 14.6 percent against 2005, according to the association.

Source: Xinhua