Recently, the number of Vietnamese small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is rapidly growing. Since most of them are run under owner's capital, they easily face cash constraint situation during their operational life cycle. Hence, the demand for Vietnamese SMEs to optimize their liquidity has been increasing and becoming a top concern. Previous studies in the supply chain field focus much on the physical flow of products/services and informational flow. Meanwhile, the financial aspect as well as its sustainability in the supply chain has been received more attention after the financial crisis of 2008. This even gets more crucial when the uncertainties in the global economy and financial markets increase pressure on businesses' cash as well as their supply chains (SC). Considering the role of this concept and its potential, this study tries to explore and examine the level of understanding about the monetary supply chain of SMEs based in Danang city and how they can access financial sources for more stability and sustainable business. The truth is many SMEs face existing problems to access financial sources like banks as well as establishing a long-lasting SC. Without a doubt the fund-raising information infrastructure in Danang city is not well developed, and local businesses still depend on financial sources from banks. Also, the connection between buyers and suppliers is still weak as they do not invest much in the infrastructure or production line to create a common ground with the business's product characteristics. In addition to that, this paper suggests some implications for the development of the local SMEs in general and their supply chains in particular.

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Article History

This paper presents the outputs of a Ministry of Science and Technology-funded national research project on fisheries value chain entitled “Developing Feasible and Comprehensive Policies for Sustainable Fisheries Development in Vietnam” completed in 2019. It was carried out to map the Vietnamese tuna value chain in terms of value chain description, including actors, material flows, volume, knowledge and information, relationships, linkages and trust, and values at different levels of the chain. The point of entry for undertaking this analysis was to identify specific income increasing interventions for fishers to achieve the project objective of better management of tuna fisheries and to improve socio-economic conditions of tuna fishing communities in Vietnam. Three South Central provinces of Binh Dinh, Phu Yen, Khanh Hoa were chosen for the investigation of the tuna value chain. This study was completed in four main phases, which consist of interview surveys, focus group discussions, individual key informant interviews, and a validation workshop. Four hundreds fishers, nineteen middlemen and traders, five processors, three wholesalers, and eight retailers were interviewed in the three investigated provinces during 2018. Several policy recommendations to increase the income and improve the position of fishers in the tuna value chain were proposed, which include (i) the collaboration among fishers to take advantage of purchasing input materials; (ii) the improvements on the handling and maintenance of tuna quality to increase fishers’ income; (iii) the establishment of tuna auction center to decrease financial detriment to fishers, increase their access to public and transparent market information, and strengthen their position in the chain; (iv) the formulation of savings, credit, and microfinance schemes to diversify forms of capital access for fishers; (v) the suggestion on a fair share of profits among shipowners, captains and cruise workers to reduce the vulnerability of the poor and increase the incentive for properly managing the tuna fisheries in Vietnam.