Mr. Nguyen Xuan Phuc - Politburo Member, Prime Minister of the Social Republic of Vietnam;

Mr Uong Chu Luu - Member of the Central Party Committee, Vice Chairman of the National Assembly
Leaders of Committees of National Assembly, Ministries and Government Office

Mr Isao Iijima, special advisor to Japanese Prime Minister

Mr Hiroshi Inoue – Managing Executive Officer from Mazda and executives, experts and engineers from Mazda

Leaders of Quang Nam Province’s Party Committee, People's Council, People's Committee, and Vietnam Father's Front Committee.

Leaders of Danang City and the provinces of Dong Nai, Quang Ngai, Lam Dong, Ben Tre, Thai Binh, Tay Ninh, and Binh Dinh

Economic experts, auto experts, leaders of local and foreign associations; 

Leaders of companies, partners, banks, shipping companies, local and foreign suppliers 

Editors-in-chief, and journalists as well as Distinguished guests,

First of all, on behalf of over 18,000 employees of Truong Hai Auto Corporation (THACO), including over 8,000 from Chu Lai - Truong Hai Complex, and more than 120,000 from our suppliers, transporters, and dealerships, I'd like to send the warmest greetings, deepest gratitude, and best wishes to the Prime Minister, city and provincial Leaders, Mazda Japan’s senior management, Editors-in-Chief, journalists, and all distinguished guests who are attending today's "Thaco Mazda Plant Grand-Opening Ceremony".

Your Excellency Mr Prime Minister, Distinguished Leaders and Guests,

Over the past 30 years of Đổi Mới, the process of international economic integration in Vietnam has become more and more comprehensive and brought many challenges and opportunities to the Vietnamese business community, including Thaco. Especially, there are strong impacts from the Fourth Industrial Revolution and ASEAN integration.

In the context, many years ago, Thaco started to build a sustainable development with the orientation to become a Vietnamese multi-business group of ASEAN level, with auto manufacture at its core. One of the key tasks is to build Chu Lai - Truong Hai Complex a modernized multi-purpose Auto Mechanical Engineering Industrial Park in Quang Nam - Central Vietnam towards modernization.

After years of preparation and development, on March 26, 2017 at Quang Nam Province Investment Promotion Conference, THACO and Quang Nam People's Committee signed an agreement on a new investment period at Chu Lai Open Economic Zone.

A key content is: Thaco is to invest in construction of a wide variety of new auto manufacturing and assembling plants in Chu Lai for trucks, buses, passenger cars, specialized vehicles, agricultural machinery factories, and support industry factory clusters with automation in the production organization in the spirit of Industrial Revolution 4.0, which meet the local content rate of at least 40%, ensuring the Corporation's leading position in Vietnam’s market and its car export goals.

Also that day, the Prime Minister started the construction of Thaco Mazda plant with a capacity of 100,000 cars a year and total investment of VND12 trillion. After one year of rapid construction and equipment installation, today, the plant has completed its first phase with a capacity of 50,000 cars per year, with VND7 trillion from Thaco capital disbursed.

Your Excellency Mr Prime Minister, Distinguished Leaders and Guests

Thaco Mazda plant is situated the section of auto manufacturing and assembling plants in Chu Lai Complex. The plant covers 30.3 hectares, including 17.3 factory-area hectares. It has received new technology transfer with higher standards from Mazda Corporation to meet the quality requirements of the new-generation products towards less fuel consumption, less electricity consumption, and environmentally friendliness.

They include modern production lines with the latest technology: automated robots on welding lines, powder coating system with continuous dipping technology, as well as color paint line with wet on wet painting technique (layers of wet paint are applied to previously administered layers of wet paint, ensuring a shiny and durable surface), meeting the car surface quality of premium paint. The assembly line has an 80% automation rate.

Quality management is strictly controlled at each section under Mazda quality management requirements. The 2.4 km test track with all types of real-life terrain conditions aims to ensure quality before car launching. The plant has been certified by the Ministry of Industry and Trade to qualify all regulations as stated in the Prime Minister's Decree No. 116.

Especially, the plant’s operations are based on a digital platform linking with the automatic lines to ensure all information to get through from A to Z to meet customized needs, embracing the spirit of the 4th Industrial Revolution. This is for step-by-step development: from a smart production line, smart workshop, towards smart factory.

We pay special attention to the fire prevention and fighting, so we have invested in a modern firefighting system with automatic firefighting equipment with the cost of USD2 million, certificated by Firefighting Police.
Especially, the factory has the density of over 55% of green trees including the beautiful green core in the middle. The setup, together with the whole industrial park, ensures clean green space and a clean production environment very outstanding in Vietnam.

Your Excellency Mr Prime Minister, Distinguished Leaders and Guests

In addition to the Thaco Mazda plant, Thaco in 2017 inaugurated Bus Thaco plant, which is the biggest in ASEAN. Its capacity is 20,000 vehicles per year (including 8,000 buses and 12,000 mini-buses) on an area of 17 hectares, including 8 hectares of factory area, with modern production lines. Especially, we have a powder coating line which can dip entirely 13.7-meter-long bodyworks. This is the only powder-coating line in Southeast Asia and one of the 22 globally so far.

Your Excellency Mr Prime Minister, Distinguished Leaders and Guests: we have signed contracts to export more than 1,100 buses and will this year ship 500 buses to regional markets such as Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines.

Thaco has also put into operation an agricultural machine factory with a designed capacity of 2,000 tractors per year, 1,000 combine harvesters and 3,000 sets of farm equipment. At the same time, Thaco has invested in upgrading all existing parts manufacturing plants and put into operation 2 more factories towards automation.

Your Excellency Mr Prime Minister, Distinguished Leaders and Guests: In 2017 these plants joined the global value chain and exported spare parts worth more than US$10 million to South Korea, Russia and Malaysia.
At present, we continue to invest in the construction of a new truck factory with a capacity of 75,000 vehicles per annum. We are expanding the Support Industries Park by additional 83 hectares, making the total area for support industries to 138 hectares.

Your Excellency Mr Prime Minister, Distinguished Leaders and Guests

One of the contents that Thaco has pledged to invest under the agreement signed with the province is Logistics, Transportation and traffic infrastructure development. Last year, Thaco expanded the prolonged the wharf at Chu Lai Port by 173m, making the total length to almost 500m, able to receive 3 ships of 20,000 DWT, the total handling is 3 million tons per year.

Especially, this morning, we launched Japan - Chu Lai International Shipping Route and received the first APL vessel in the route. This is one of the largest container shipping lines with destinations to most of the major ports around the world. At present, Chu Lai port has regular container routes: Korea - Chu Lai; China - Chu Lai; Japan - Chu Lai and Chu Lai - Ho Chi Minh City - Hai Phong. Thaco is also planning to invest in the construction of a new wharf, while Quang Nam also dredges a navigation pathway up to 11.5m deep to ensure that it will receive 50,000 DWT ships to improve its logistics capacity.

Thaco also invests in a project that expands the main road from Chu Lai Port to the expressway. We are constructing a 2-level roundabout in Chu Lai with investment capital of VND600 billion. The whole project will be donated to Quang Nam. In addition, Thaco has invested in 265 hectares of worker housing and Tam Hiep urban area to provide housing for workers, specialists, with many facilities such as kindergartens, schools, supermarkets... This aims to attract human resources for Chu Lai Open Economic Zone.

Your Excellency Mr Prime Minister, Distinguished Leaders and Guests

The new Thaco Mazda factory is set to be the most modern Mazda facility in Southeast Asia, this is very meaningful in creating customer trust in Vietnam, in order to support Vietnam-made products and to meet the need of exporting cars to regional markets per Mazda plans.

Year 2018 is also the first year of ASEAN integration, with CBU import tariffs being 0 percent. The Vietnamese auto industry has to face a fierce competition with other regional countries such as: Thailand, Indonesia, or Malaysia -- these economies are much more developed than Vietnam’s, Their auto industries have developed strongly and stably for more than 70 years.

We hope the Government continues to put forward market stabilization policies to control the quality of imported cars from ASEAN to ensure 0% tariff requirements. We also hope the Government will properly develop tax mechanism in a certain period of time to further develop the domestic auto industry.

Thaco is a leading automaker in Vietnam, considered one of the representative enterprises and a pillar in the new development cycle of the domestic auto industry. Meanwhile, world renowned automakers, though they have very long production in Vietnam, but have largely shifted to CBU imports.

THACO is committed to provide the products with latest technology, high quality, at reasonable prices to ensure market stabilization and increase the localization rate. By this way, we support the development of the central region’s engineering sector and Vietnam’s auto industry. 

In addition to our main auto business, we are also involved in the development of key economic sectors in the direction of becoming a multidisciplinary group to contribute more to the economic development of the country. We will always be careful in order to avoid financial risk as well as management problems, avoid difficult situations, so as not to cause social and economic consequences.

Your Excellency Mr Prime Minister, Distinguished Leaders and Guests

In today's ceremony, I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Prime Minister, leaders of the Party, State, Government, Central Government policies to develop the Vietnamese auto industry, and support and instructions for THACO over the time.

Thanks to the leaders of Quang Nam who have been always with us with full support, thus creating a mutual relationship: Thaco’s development is thanks to the selection of Quang Nam and today’s Quang Nam development conditions also resulted partially from Thaco’s great contributions. I would like to send my special thanks to Mazda Japan for technology transfer and putting into operation the Thaco Mazda plant.

Mazda has helped to make the plant part of its global network by sending here highly skilled engineers with lots of experience to provide technical assistance, supervision and training for Thaco engineers at Mazda factories in Japan. As we understand that technology is a long-accumulated valuable asset that is not easy to obtain, we pledge to strive to maintain the strategic relationship that ensures rapid, sustainable development based on our mutual benefits and sharing in philosophy and business culture.

My gratitude is also dedicated to the leaders and journalists who have always been supporting THACO. We are committed to providing honest and timely information to the public through the media.

I wish good health, happiness and success to Your Excellency Mr Prime Minister, Distinguished Leaders and Guests

Thank you very much!