Mostly good news: Vingroup ventilators, telemedicine, metro & solar
/The markets are up! Two days in a row! Hallelujah! To celebrate, I am going through a few updates:
First, this is a few days old: Vingroup will import parts to make ventilators from Medtronic (a big US medical device company) and then sell them at cost to the government. Vingroup will eat the cost of labor, manufacturing, transport and taxes. The order is comprised of 10,000 invasive ventilators and 45,000 noninvasive ones. The invasive ones take over someone’s breathing, as far I understand. Vingroup will also donate 5,000 non-invasive ventilators to the government.
It will be interesting to see if Vingroup start manufacturing medical devices after this. According to this settlement with the government, Medtronic manufacturers the majority of its products in the US, or in trading partners like Mexico and Ireland. Although it does manufacture in China and Malaysia as well. Maybe Vietnam is next.
Second, in more healthcare news, I found this announcement interesting. In the US, the healthcare market I know best, telemedicine is still nascent and getting a jumpstart with COVID-19. There are a lot of companies looking to do this, and so it is no surprise that telemedicine is happening in SE Asia as well through this new company Doctor Anywhere. The company just received $27m in funding.
In Vietnam, it is working with ViettelPay and Bao Minh insurance (all of the insurance company’s 7m customers will be able to use Doctor Anywhere.
Third, more good news for the metro in HCMC, it has finished more than 70% of construction and is hiring 58 train drivers. They will go through a year and a half of training (!) and be set to work the trains when the metro opens in 2021. I can’t wait until this is done. Hopefully the city will keep up the pace for extensions and other lines as well. It needs public transport.
Fourth, the government finally issued feed-in tariffs for solar. I have written about these before here and here. The new tariffs are:
Floating solar power projects: $0.0769/kwh
Ground-mounted solar power projects: $0.0709/kwh
Rooftop solar power projects: $0.0838/kwh
Rooftop solar was higher in the first draft (not sure if it was a draft or just a news report), but then fell to this level in the second. It still isn’t too bad, but not as good as it was ($0.0935).
These are applicable to most projects as long as they are finished and connected to the grid by the end of this year (end of next year for some projects in Ninh Thuan province). For the ones not in Ninh Thuan, there is some concern that with COVID-19, it will be hard to make the deadline. I wonder how the government will treat these. Hopefully fairly.
After these tariffs expire at the end of this year (next for Ninh Thuan), all projects will go to competitive bidding. An auction system might be better for the country, because the government will be better able to manage where new solar goes in, and hopefully will get a better price. I just hope that they put tons of new generation contracts up for auction soon. It seems like they could start as early as the second half of this year.