Vietnamese seafood leveraging value-added advantages
At the Global Seafood Exhibition held from April 23-25th in Barcelona, Vietnam’s value-added processed seafood products attracted considerable attention from customers.
Vietnam’s national pavilion at the 2024 Global Seafood Exhibition has a total of 37 processing and exporting units, including 09 shrimp processing companies, 08 pangasius processing companies, 04 tuna processing companies, and 15 seafood processing companies.
Ready-to-eat shrimp and pangasius products were processed into a variety of dishes and offered to visitors to taste directly at the booths. The processed products were extremely diverse, blended with many ingredients that visitors found exciting and highly rated after tasting.
Market fluctuations in recent years have shown that the strategy focused on value-added processed seafood products is more suitable for Vietnamese seafood enterprises. Therefore, there is a transition in product structure within each key export sector.
For example, in the first quarter of this year, while exports of frozen fillet pangasius decreased by 5%, exports of value-added processed pangasius products increased by 16%, and dried pangasius exports increased by nearly 9%. Notably, two supplementary product lines, pangasius bubble and fish skin snacks, recorded significant growth. Pangasius bubble exports reached $19.4 million, up 17%, with the largest market being China, accounting for 79%.
Likewise, as for shrimp exports, noticeable growth was recorded in headless, peeled, and deveined shrimp products in the first quarter of this year. As for tuna, the canned product line saw the strongest growth, up 48% from the same period last year. In markets such as the United States, European Union, and Japan, value-added processed seafood products are Vietnam’s advantage.
VFM