With more than 30 Australian woolgrowers toured Vietnam and Hong Kong this month to witness the growth in the use of wool and to hear about the effectiveness of their levy-funded marketing. Australian Wool Innovation’s marketing subsidiary The Woolmark Company has set an ambitious target to absorb three percent of Vietnam’s $27 billion textile export market within four years.

As the 2014-15 financial year saw the Vietnamese textile market acquire 800,000 kilograms of Australian wool - predominantly via early stage processing mills in China.

AWI Vietnam consultant Tran Van Quyen said that it was a realistic goal for Australian wool to penetrate 3pc, or $810 million, of the Vietnamese textiles and garment exports market by 2020.

Biting-off a larger slice of the textile market will be achieved through education, according to Dr Quyen, who is currently teaching 12 traditionally acrylic spinners how to manufacture wool and wool blended yarns.

Several of the 12 companies now trained in the dyeing, knitting and finishing processes had already started with commercial orders.

The next goal was to encourage early stage processing of top making and scouring in Vietnam’s garment-focused industry. This would act as an alternative to Australia’s heavy reliance on China as the major buyer of greasy wool, Dr. Quyen said.

This was behind AWI originally entrance in to the Vietnamese market in the early 2000s following their Free Trade Agreement with the United States, however political challenges stymied this attempt.

Consultant Gary Robinson said that in 2014, in an effort to increase competition with China for Australian wool, AWI reignited the market with Russia and had another bid at generating a new market in Vietnam.

Last year, Dr Robinson facilitated a trial with Nasilkmex, near Hanoi, to use wool/acrylic blends in sweaters. Despite only “fair success”, Nasilkmex adopted 90pc of AWI’s recommendations and last week began the commercial processing of wool which was witness by Australian woolgrowers.

Although Australia will never be the powerhouse China has been because of their general capacity but there is no reason they can’t be proportionally as good and see significant growth and importance to the Australian wool clip in Vietnam market.