Vietnam Dairy Product Joint Stock Company, or Vinamilk, is building three processing plants at a cost of US$270 million that will become operational one by one late next year and in early 2012.
They include two plants worth $120 million each in Binh Duong Province near Ho Chi Minh City and a $23 million plant in the central city of Danang.
One of the Binh Duong plants, being built in the My Phuoc Industrial Park, will produce 800 million liters of milk a year. The other, a milk powder plant in the Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Park, will have an annual capacity of 52,000 tons, or four times the capacity of Vinamilk’s existing plant in neighboring Dong Nai Province.
The Danang plant will make ready-to-eat yoghurt.
Vinamilk recently sold its Saigon Coffee Plant in My Phuoc Industrial Park to Trung Nguyen Joint Stock Company for $40 million.
Also recently it received the green light from the Ministry of Planning and Investment to make its first foreign foray, a $23.35 million investment to buy a 19.3 percent stake in the New Zealand-based dairy firm Miraka Co., Ltd.
Earlier this month Vinamilk became the first Vietnamese firm to be ranked by Forbes Asia as among the region’s best businesses in terms of profits, prospects, and other criteria.
With revenues of just under $1 billion, it has a domestic dairy market share of 39 percent.