Two-Stage PLS-SEM and Fuzzy AHP Approach to Investigate Vietnamese SMEs’ Export Competitiveness

Vietnam is paying great to the seafood exporting sector, offering various significant production advantages, concluding that it is critical to understand the competitiveness of the target market and implement effective strategies. However, due to COVID 19, the value of Vietnamese pangasius exports resulted in low and unpredictable profits for pangasius farmers. It is obvious to recognize competitiveness as Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem in the uncertain business environment. Therefore, this study is the first to propose a two-staged Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) and Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) analysis to identify potential criteria and comprehensively investigate the competitiveness of Vietnamese pangasius export Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the context of China market. First, a dataset of 186 valid respondents from seafood export SMEs was collected through an online survey from June to December 2020. The PLS-SEM approach was applied to ascertain the positive impact of the proposed criteria contributing to the competitiveness of Vietnamese pangasius against China market. The PLS-SEM results showed that all criteria strongly correlated with the pangasius exporting competitiveness. Then, the FAHP method is employed to rank the subjective weights of mentioned criteria based on 12 experts’ judgments. Knowledge infrastructure (C3) has the highest rank of competitiveness criteria with the highest weight, followed by Product (C4). In contrast, Prices (C6) was indicated as the lowest rank at 0.107 regarding FAHP results. Furthermore, this study provides insights into stakeholders seeking to improve competitiveness performance.