According to Wall Street Journal, Vietnam is becoming one of the largest offshore production bases for Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones and tablets. The WSJ's James Hookway looks at how the Korean electronics giant, which now accounts for more than 10% of Vietnam's exports, is transforming Hanoi and surrounding hubs. O
According to Wall Street Journal, Vietnam is becoming one of the largest offshore production bases for Samsung's Galaxy smartphones and tablets. The WSJ's James Hookway looks at how the Korean electronics giant, which now accounts for more than 10% of Vietnam's exports, is transforming Hanoi and surrounding hubs.
Other global names, such as LG Electronics , Intel and Foxconn Technology, are also stepping up investments and helping accelerate one of the developing world's fastest economic transformations ever, as Vietnam's shipments of smartphones and computer parts begin to overtake exports of coffee, garments and shrimp.
Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. said this economy could benefit from how industrialization often happens faster today than it did in the past, especially in high-tech businesses, where new trends quickly set root and leapfrog older ways of doing things. While Japanese companies took 40 years to climb to the top of the global value chain, Korean companies took only 30 years, McKinsey said. Chinese companies, such as Huawei Technologies, achieved the same feat in 20 years.
Deepak Mishra, until recently the World Bank's lead economist in Vietnam, said some experts “argue that Vietnam's manufacturing sector is perhaps at the stage where China was in the late 1990s, when high-tech exports suddenly took off.” And it is not just on the hardware side. New tech startups are turning Vietnam into a player on the Asian software development scene, while the computer skills of its high-school students wowed a seasoned Google engineer. Neil Fraser recently visited Vietnam on vacation and marveled at the technological skills displayed by computer science students at a school in Danang, in central Vietnam. Fifth-grade students, he said, were performing at the level of 11th graders in the U.S., while he estimated that around half of the Vietnamese 11th-graders could pass the Google interview test.
Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung is focused on bringing in [more] investors from Japan and elsewhere to help upgrade Vietnam's infrastructure to enable its technology sector to grow.