He also produces channel catfish and mitten crab © Tran Van Van
Tran Van Van was born in 1982 in the Red River delta in northern Vietnam. Through his teens, he could see the country changing, and the building boom inspired him to study civil engineering at the University of Transportation in Hanoi. The following ten years Van worked in the construction sector, primarily building bridges.
In 2011 he married a young aquaculture graduate and began to develop an interest in the sector, spending many weekends accompanying his brother-in-law, who also worked in aquaculture, on fish farm visits, and even working at his fish farm and hatchery. He enjoyed the experience so much that by 2014 he made the big decision to change career.
Starting afresh
With help from his brother-in-law, Van started his first fish farm in Gia Lam district, Hanoi, in his words, “spending a significant amount of money to set it up and with little hands-on experience”.
The company was called Công ty Cổ phần Quốc tế Minh Phú, which translates as Minh Phu International Joint Stock Company. He used his civil engineering experience to help design, construct and develop the site, and tried to incorporate the best elements of all the different farms he had visited.
Investing quite significantly from his own resources, he built a series of earth ponds for grow-out of tilapia, black and common carp, as well as a pond hapa-based hatchery and hired five staff. It proved a steep learning curve, with significant mortalities often occurring, for reasons he didn’t then understand. After a year he realised that the site made more income from producing all-male tilapia fingerlings than from the grow-out of the other species in ponds, so he soon looked to expand to a bigger site where grow-out was more financially viable.
As a result, in 2016 he bought a cage farm site on the 200 km² Ha Binh hydro scheme reservoir on the Da river, where water temperatures varied between 18-24 °C, depending on the season. When he arrived, there were already over 4,000 cages on the reservoir, divided between local households who typically owned two to three smaller cages each, and 10 larger companies, each with between 100 and 200 cages. The main species they grew were tilapia, common carp and grass carp, although one of the larger companies also grew Ictalurus punctatus, the US catfish, and had their own fish restaurant in Hanoi.
Van decided to concentrate on cage grow-out of tilapia and Ictalurus. Feeding a readily available 28-35 percent crude protein pelleted diet (at VND 14,000/ $0.70 per kg), in 8 months he could grow the tilapia up to 0.8-1.5 kg, whilst in 1 year the catfish reached 2.5-3.5 kg. He was well aware that in Hanoi, just 2.5 hours’ drive away, was a growing, lucrative, unmet market demand for these two species, especially if sold live – with tilapia fetching VND 35,000/ $1.8 per kg, and catfish VND 85,000/ $4.
In the early days he employed four full time and one part time staff and started with 25 cages, each 6 x 6m x 3m depth, in a water depth that varied from 40 m in summer and to 60 m in the winter. Each cage produced an average of 3 tonnes of tilapia or catfish per annum, making a grand total of 50 tonnes of catfish and 25 tonnes of tilapia.
Expanding across the value chain
By 2017 Van had sold his original pond hatchery to expand his cage site’s production capacity, buying good quality fingerlings at a much lower unit cost than producing them himself.
He also learnt that his margins were reduced by selling the bulk of his production to middlemen and in late 2017 he set up his first live fish retail store in Long Bien district in Hanoi, which at that time was quite unusual outside of the large live wholesale markets where fish were normally bought and sold.
By 2019, with sales going well, he set up two further live fish stores in Tay Ho and Hoang Mai districts, with in total nine full time staff working in the shops. At this time, Van also began buying fish from four other companies farming on Hoa Binh reservoir, with live fish shipments being sent from Hoa Binh, two to three times per week.
Van’s main customers were middle to higher income earners between 35-65 years of age, many buying for their own kitchen garden restaurants, but there was also a loyal home consumption customer base. Average sales varied from 2-15kg per customer. The business also developed its sales through regular advertising across social media, including short informative videos as well as daily communication with customers through Facebook, Zalo and by phone.
When Covid struck in 2020 one of the stores was closed and the sales staff reduced to five. but gradually since 2022 demand and sales started to increase again, with stores particularly busy during the Tet (lunar new year) and other major festivals. He now operates 45 cages, with annual production and sales of 135 tonnes, with six full-time and one part-time staff on the farm site and three staff between the two shops.
Diversification
In 2023, Van diversified by starting to grow and sell Chinese mitten crab Eriocheir sinensis, a native freshwater species much prized in the Vietnamese market for their roe and sweet meat as a seasonal autumn delicacy.
In October the crabs migrate to estuaries and brackish water areas for spawning, where they are caught by fishermen (at 100-200 g average weight) using bag nets. After making enquiries in China, Van began importing hatchery-reared seed crab (between 5-20 g) and started developing freshwater pond and rice field culture of these crabs to sell through his shops and online.
Following trials Van has found the best stocking densities in ponds for seed were 6,000-10,000 per hectare, with the grow-out period in ponds from 5g to 150-200 g taking 1 year. Their market price in Hanoi, where they are sold at 100-200 g each, ranges from 350,000 VND to 750,000 VND ($13.8-29.6) per kg, depending on size and quality .Although the females are smaller, the Vietnamese prize their taste more than the males. Van has not kept this technology to himself and has started distributing seed (both imported and locally caught) to local farmers, while also offering them startup and technical support, as well as buying back the mature crabs to sell in his stores. This new species has further increased his customer base, as well as income, especially between September and December.
Van has been consistently committed to offering a wide variety of live, fresh and ready-to-eat products, designed to save customers time and provide greater convenience. Looking ahead, he believes the aquaculture sector across Vietnam will shift more towards sustainable practices, focusing on increasing productivity while sharing and conserving water resources – a policy driven both by younger, more environmentally aware consumers and also by the government, who realise the huge value (domestically and internationally) of the sector and the need to improve its sustainability.
