Along Highway 389 - the section passing Bai Oi village, Dinh Tri commune (Bac Giang city), from dawn to dusk, furniture workshops are full of sounds of sawing machines. Quickly pouring paint into a pot to spray tables and chairs, Ha Thanh Duan, owner of Thanh Duan carpentry workshop in Bai Oi village said: “Last year, due to the impact of Covid-19, the workshop saw no clients for many months and workers had to suspend working. 

Since the end of October, the demand for wooden furniture has started to increase, the number of customers who come to order products are many times more than the previous month." In November alone, the facility had nearly 100 new orders, customers received the products before Tet holiday. For the last 15 days, the workshop owner has stopped accepting new orders while employing five seasonal workers who work day to night.

Carpenters in Dong Thuong village, Lang Son commune (Yen Dung district) are perfecting their product.

According to a representative of the Board of Directors of the Bai Oi Carpentry Cooperative, the main products of the craft village are beds, wardrobes, tables, chairs, shelves, clocks and feng shui animals, among others. The village has nearly 200 households, with half of them involving in carpentry, which creates regular jobs for hundreds of workers with a salary of 6-10 million VND (260-432 USD) per person per month. At this time, the carpentry village is quite busy. The number of workers has increased three times compared to the previous month, but the consumption has decreased about 20 percent year-on-year. However, the price of wooden products rose by 1.5-8 million VND (64-345 USD) per set of products compared to the beginning of last year, depending on size, processing form and materials.

Similarly, the Dong Thuong carpentry village in Lang Son commune (Yen Dung district) is also busy again after many months of social distancing to prevent and control the pandemic to meet great consumer demand at the end of the year. Nguyen Van Tuyen, who boasts more than 30 years of doing this craft, said: “Customers who shop wooden products on this occasion have decreased over the previous year due to the Covid-19 impact. Most of them choose products made of domestic wood at affordable prices. Very few people order expensive well-designed products made of imported wood. I have 30 orders to complete from now until Tet, but they are mainly beds, shelves and altars made of oval and jackfruit wood, with a price from 4 to 20 million VND (173-865 USD) per unit. Not only Tuyen's family but most of the carpentry households in Dong Thuong village see well-priced products sold out.

In the carpentry villages of Mai Dinh commune (Hiep Hoa district), along the main road to the villages, there are many vehicles transporting wooden furniture and customers. Unlike the previous year, the wooden products of the craft villages mainly serve the domestic market. Due to the impact of the pandemic, they are not exported to the Chinese market.

The price of wooden products increased, the people chose mid-end products, and the purchasing power decreased over the same period because Covid-19 resulted in higher input materials, especially imported wood, while the people's income fell, forcing them to tighten spending. However, in order to build a brand, the craftsmen still put their prestige first, carefully choosing wood before making delicate furniture products. As a result, the average annual income of households here still ranged from 200 million VND (8,656 USD) to billions of VND. Wooden furniture and handicraft cooperatives and associations have regularly organized training courses on skills to access domestic and international markets. Many members have actively invested in modern machinery to improve product quality and competitiveness, thus raising income.

Over the past years, Party committees and authorities at all levels have always paid attention to building product brands and supporting craft villages to invest in expanding production scale and promoting product consumption, while upgrading roads and power systems. Therefore, the carpentry villages have developed in the direction of modernization and increasingly dominated the domestic and international markets.

Bac Giang: Total retail sales of goods and services up 0.6 percent in 2020

BGO - According to the report of the provincial Department of Industry and Trade, in December 2020, the total retail sales of goods and services in the province were estimated at 3.059 trillion VND (132.5 million USD), up 3.7 percent over the previous month. The figure for the whole year 2020 was projected at 29.58 trillion VND (1.28 billion USD), up 0.6 percent year-on-year.

Traffic Safety Year 2021 launched

The National Committee for Traffic Safety in collaboration with the Hanoi People’s Committee organised a ceremony in Hanoi on January 5 to launch the Year of Traffic Safety 2021 and kicked off a campaign on traffic order and safety during the upcoming Tet holiday season (Lunar New Year).

Hoang Phuong