"The annual report will offer an overall view of the local business community in the context of international integration and major changes in the domestic business climate as well as foreign investors’ assessments of the local business environment," says the chamber’s chairman Vu Tien Loc.

The report covers the year 2006 and assesses and evaluates major changes in key sectors based on a survey and 2005 figures from the General Statistics Office. The year 2006 was chosen as a baseline prior to Viet Nam’s accession to WTO in 2007.

The report stated that telecoms and insurance sectors suffered the most serious losses at 80.56 per cent and 54.10 per cent. They were followed by textiles and garments (45.93 per cent); electronics (43.05 per cent); marine transport (41.7 per cent); automobiles (35.95 per cent); seafood (26.25 per cent) and banking (24.11 per cent).

The poor performance of the telecoms sector was partly blamed on its short life span and larger initial amount of investment capital compared to other sectors, while the unsatisfactory result of the insurance sector was attributed to the fact that 33 out of 61 insurance firms incurred losses in 2005.

It found that Vietnamese firms were optimistic about the domestic business climate as 75.72 per cent of enterprises planned to expand their business in the next two years; 62.81 per cent said that they would expand if they could more easily access land; while 69.19 said that extra expense remained problematic.

The report also showed that the ratio of enterprises applying e-commerce to business was still low with textiles and garments at 2 per cent, automobiles at 1.8 per cent, marine transportation at 1.6 per cent, telecoms at 1.2 per cent and banking at 0.7 per cent.

Besides, the report evaluated the effects of the country’s accession to the World Trade Organisation on local businesses specialising in eight industries including apparel, insurance, telecoms, seafood, automobiles, banking, marine transportation and electronics.