Vietnamese toys grab home market from Chinese

Vietnamese toys seem to have captured the domestic market from their Chinese counterparts ahead of this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival.
Tran Xuan Noi, owner of toy shop No 49 in Hanoi’s Hang Ma Street, said Chinese still filled shops but the most popular with children were Vietnamese toys like the TOSY spinning top and boomerang, the Winwin Toy, Tiditoy, and ETIC’s wooden toys.

This was for the first ever time that Vietnamese toys outsold Chinese ones, he said.

“This is a good first step for Vietnam to wrest back the market which was long dominated by Chinese toys,” he said.

Though TOSY’s tops made their debut only a month ago, they had achieved impressive sales, he said.

TOSY’s sales of several dozens a day have been much higher than that of the Chinese toys which dominated last summer, like the AI Football GGo, ARMO Hero, and Fruity Robo.

Its producer, Tosy Robotics JSC, said it sold around 40,000 in July alone and had received orders for more than 50,000 from foreign partners during this Mid-Autumn Festival.

Many Hanoi sellers said Vietnamese toys were very competitively priced compared with foreign products.

AI Football GGO and Fruity Robo figures cost around 899,000 dong (US$45) and 395,000 dong, while a TOSY boomerang cost only 129,000 dong, the top was 299,000 dong, and the wooden items were around 300,000 dong, they said.

Other imported toys such as the Japanese Bey Blade spinning top, Denmark’s Lego, and the US-made Barbie dolls cost up to a couple of million of dong.

Vietnamese toy makers also paid much attention to safety, the sellers said.

The wooden toys had their sharp edges carefully pared while the plastic toys were made of high-quality materials that were non-toxic and not as brittle as that used in Chinese toys, they said.

Chinese toy makers usually took advantage of cartoons shown on Vietnamese TV to sell related toys, they said.

AI Football GGo, ARMO Hero, and Fruity Robo were all popular after cartoons with the same names began to be shown.

But while this initially helped, sales slumped after the cartoons went off the air, they said, adding this gave Vietnamese toys the chance to grab market share by focusing on quality, eye design, and competitive pricing.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is being celebrated today.

Tags: Vietnamese toys