Recalling the day when the A/H5N1 avian influenza broke out in 2003 and caused damages worth trillions of dong to the livestock industry, Tran Xuan Hanh, deputy director of Navetco, a veterinary medicine company, said all the vaccines to prevent the disease were imports. 

At that time, Vietnam not only had to spend a lot on imports, but also could not control the supply because it depended on foreign suppliers’ deliveries.

Navetco was then assigned by the Ministry of Science & Technology (MST) to work on an A/H5N1 vaccine product to support the domestic livestock industry. 

Using reverse genetic technology to create virus strain and applying the two advanced vaccine production technologies – chick embryo and emulsifier, Navetco successfully created the vaccine to prevent A/H5N1.

According to Le Anh Kiet, director of the HCMC-based A.K.B Manufacturing, the survey on automation and robotics training in Vietnam found that investments in technological teaching equipment was very modest. 

Some schools give training on robotics, but students don’t have many opportunities to practice with robots. 

Some schools spent hundreds of millions of dong to buy robots, but many have been left idle as they broke and there were no spare parts.

This was the motivation for Kiet to research and develop a robot used in training. Kiet decided that the locally made content ratio in the robot must be at the highest possible level and the production cost must be at the lowest possible level.

After one year of research with funding from the national program on developing high technology by 2020, A.K.B successfully invented a robot with the localization ratio of 95 percent and the production cost which is just half of imports.

The price for one robot is VND200 million. Unlike the training robots of foreign firms, this product allows disassembly and a control system through the users’ interface. For implementing tasks, students can interact with the system through keys, enter data or set programs and monitor the results on computers. 

This robot control system can be applied in industry and can connect to production lines, controlling the PLC through the In/Out gate of the robot.

Made-in-Vietnam products created under the national science & technology programs show that if the state accepts to make investments, made-in-Vietnam products can be in no way inferior to imported products, while they are much cheaper.