Vu Van Ngan - success from passion and overcoming difficulties

Yen Bai - Dare to think, dare to do to affirm his youth, Mr. Vu Van Ngan, 33 years old in Phu Son village, Yen Phu commune, Van Yen district is currently the owner of a mechanical engineering workshop with an income of over 1 billion VND per year.

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Together with the leaders of Yen Phu commune, we visited Mr. Ngan's mechanical workshop when he and his workers were completing the final details of the cinnamon bark peeling machine to deliver to customers. Through the conversation with Mr. Ngan, we learned that before coming to the mechanical profession, Ngan had also experienced many different jobs.

As the eldest of three siblings, after finishing high school, Ngan had to put aside her dream of going to university to help her parents support her younger siblings' education. She worked many jobs, from driving a bulldozer, repairing rudimentary mechanical tools, to working as a worker at an auto repair shop in Yen Bai city.

However, having a passion for mechanics for a long time, after many years of working for hire, having some capital and borrowing more, in 2016, Ngan researched and then built a cinnamon branch peeling machine. With just iron frame details, a 3-phase lathe motor with a simple structure, Ngan successfully built a cinnamon branch peeling machine. However, the first product was not as expected because it was quite bulky, required many details so the price was quite high.

Determined to do it, Ngan consulted knowledge on the internet and visited some mechanical workshops in Yen Bai to learn. Thus, the cinnamon branch peeling machine was gradually improved, with fewer details to reduce the product cost. With each completed product, Ngan gained more experience to make the following products even more perfect.

At first, he only made a few to sell and test locally, but after a year, Ngan's products were available in some neighboring localities in the province and then spread out of the province. With orders, Ngan rented a convenient roadside area in the village to open a workshop and hired more workers.

Vu Van Ngan said: "At first, I thought of making a cinnamon branch peeling machine to serve my family, because my family has 1 hectare of cinnamon. Every year when it comes to cinnamon harvest, only the trunk and large branches can be peeled manually, while the small branches are sold to cinnamon essential oil processing factories. To fully exploit the cinnamon bark product, the branches must be crushed and then peeled off, which takes a lot of time. If there was a machine to replace those steps, the value of cinnamon exploitation would be much higher. From that thought, I researched and made a cinnamon branch peeling machine. Since having this machine, all types of cinnamon branches can be peeled quite simply, without requiring as much labor as before."

At first, when Ngan first made the cinnamon peeling machine, it took her a whole week to assemble and manufacture one machine, but now she can make 1-3 machines a day, depending on the needs of the user. Each machine has a different value, the lowest is about 10 million VND, the highest is 36 million VND.

In 2022 alone, Ngan's workshop sold 500 units of various types to the provinces: Lao Cai, Bac Kan, Quang Nam, Son La... and after deducting the cost of renting premises, paying 8 workers at 400,000 VND/person/day, paying taxes, deducting the cost of purchasing raw materials and machine parts, Ngan earns more than 1 billion VND in profit each year.

Sharing about her plans for the future, Ngan said she will complete procedures to register exclusive products to protect her brand; at the same time, expand the scale of manufacturing other types of agricultural tools to free up labor for people to increase economic efficiency in agricultural and forestry production.

At the same time, it creates more jobs and stable income for local youth workers and promotes the youth movement to start a business in their locality. Another important effect is that, from the cinnamon peeling machine manufacturing model of Vu Van Ngan, it has created more motivation for the Party Committee and the Yen Phu commune government to expand the youth union's start-up movement and strive to have at least 2-5 youth-led start-up models each year.

Thanh Tan

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