A STEELMAKER turning to pigs and animal feed, a property developer raising cows, a stockbroker milling rice and a real-estate-to-retail billionaire growing fruit and vegetables.

    Three decades after Vietnam started moving away from a farm economy toward manufacturing of big-brand textiles and electronics, some of its top firms are carving out opportunities in its US$37 billion agriculture and seafood sector and looking to expand overseas, helped by free trade pacts.

    “We’ll have global food shortages by 2050. If we invest fundamentally and correctly, this market is infinite,” said Nguyen Duy Hung, chairman of Vietnam’s top brokerage, Saigon Securities, who has a side business he’s expanding into rice, seafood and supermarket produce.

    Vietnam is among the world’s top exporters of rice, coffee, cashew nuts, seafood, pepper and rubber and it shipped US$24.5 billion of farm and fisheries produce last year.

    But the World Bank says the value of its agribusiness is just 1.2 times that of its primary agriculture, compared with 2.7 times in South Korea. And the country still relies on billions of dollars of foodstuff imports.

    The unlikely interest in food comes from industrial firms such as steelmaker Hoa Phat Group, which has converted its minerals unit to livestock feed.

    It has built a new feed plant with annual capacity of 300,000 tons, aiming for 1 million tons, and wants to be raising a million pigs a year by 2020.

    “Although this new sector is extremely competitive, just as much as the steel industry, we firmly believe we will be successful,” CEO Tran Tuan Duong told shareholders recently.

    Vietnam’s only billionaire, Pham Nhat Vuong of Vingroup, is piling into private schools, hospitals and shopping malls. But his latest move is a little off-piste — a US$91 million investment in growing fruit and vegetables.

    And on the home page of real estate firm Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL), it’s grazing cows rather than condominiums that meet the eye: it has just listed a cattle and rubber unit with a market value of US$1.1 billion, bigger than the parent.

    HAGL predicts nearly half the group’s revenue this year will come from cows. It wants to tap milk demand that has grown 36 times over in the past quarter-century, satisfied in part by imports worth US$1 billion a year.(SD-Agencies)