by Huang Haimin Bui Minhlong

    HANOI, Oct. 27 (Xinhua) -- Showing her last customers in the morning to the door of an air-conditioned room, Nguyen Thi Hoa caught the sight of herself some years ago: a woman with a weather-beaten face bending her back to push a wooden wagon fully loaded with Chinese apples and pears through Vietnam's Lao Cai international border gate in the baking sun.

    Sitting relaxedly in a new three-story building cum her office in Lao Cai ward, Lao Cai city, northern Lao Cai province, Hoa looks prettily younger than her age of 45. "Nearly a decade ago, I was just a porter like her," the portly middle-aged woman told Xinhua recently, pointing her hand to the woman pushing the wagon along with two younger men.

    She said thanks to flexible trade policies of both Vietnam and China as well as their fine economic relations, after years of saving money and learning experiences of her employers, she has managed to own the building and run her own private business: importing Chinese fruits and then reselling them to Vietnamese traders from different localities.

    "Besides my own fruit business, I'm planning to pour money into a transport company of my friend. The transport business here is very lucrative because many businesspeople in northern localities such as Hanoi, Thai Nguyen, Hai Phong and Bac Ninh hire transport enterprises in Lao Cai to transport Chinese steel billets and steel products," she said, noting that her friend's company has 5-6 contracts on transporting thousands of tons of the Chinese imports a month.

    Not only people from Lao Cai but also local businesses from other Vietnamese localities, including southern Ho Chi Minh City have made money in the province, especially its areas near the Lao Cai international border gate.

    Ho Chi Minh City-based Binh Tien Consumer Goods Company, famous for its footwear branded Biti's, is investing 14 million U.S. dollars in building a 17-story trade center adjacent to the bordergate. The Lao Cai International Border Gate Trade Center is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year.

    "We put the first floor into operation in 2006, creating space for enterprises to display and sell their products here. Although there is only one operational floor with 11 booths selling such items as jewelries, woodworks, footwear, and pottery, our trade center receives up to 200-300 customers a day, even 500-700 customers a day at weekends or on holidays," said Binh Tien's staff named Trinh Van Son.

    Most of the customers are tourists, especially Chinese ones, he said, noting that his company currently has three representative offices in China: one in Hekou, one in Nanning and one in Kunming.

    Import-export turnovers and the number of passengers traveling via border gates in Lao Cai have increased drastically since 1992.The turnovers surged to 467 million dollars in 2006 from 118 million dollars in 2000. They reached 540 million dollars in the first seven months of this year, up 79 percent against the same period last year.

    In October 1991, when Lao Cai province was formed, its socioeconomic situations were not good. Its annual gross domestic product (GDP) per capita stood at 680,000 Vietnamese dong (VND) (42.5 U.S. dollars). Up to 56 out of 180 communes had no paved roads leading to their centers, and seven out of 10 districts and towns were not connected to national power grids.