~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

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Outsourcing finds its way to Vietnam

HANOI - With a portrait of Ho Chi Minh gazing down benevolently opposite the doorway and fan blades making leisurely orbits above, the long green room looks as if it could still belong to officials from the Communist-controlled legislature here, its former occupants.

Instead, the room holds one of the more unusual outposts in the shift of clerical jobs to ever-poorer countries in the developing world. Rows of young university graduates working for World'Vest Base, a company based in Chicago, scan the Internet for everything from emerging market stock prices to corporate filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. They copy data into spreadsheets and e-mail it to clients around the world.

Vietnam is making a big push to turn itself into an outsourcing powerhouse. Mathematics instruction has long been the strong suit of Vietnam's educational system, and now the country's government is trying to train people across the country in computer skills. At the same time, wages remain extremely low: World'Vest Base hires recent graduates with accounting or finance degrees, but no experience, for a starting salary of $100 a month, little more than an unskilled factory worker earns in neighboring China. Very low wages and strong math skills are a combination that has made believers of some experts. "You're going to see Vietnam competing with India and some of the other countries doing this within the next five years," said Pete Peterson, a prisoner of war here for six years during the Vietnam War who went on to become the first U.S. ambassador after President Clinton normalized relations.

Yet Vietnam still faces considerable obstacles in its pursuit of the kind of low-skill jobs that now employ hundreds of thousands of people in India, Malaysia and the Philippines, let alone the higher-paid computer programming jobs that have helped turn Indian cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad into prosperous models of economic development. With the approach of the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon next spring, Vietnam remains one of the poorest countries on Earth. It still struggles under a Communist government that has moved more slowly than China's to embrace capitalism. Government bureaucracy and regulations remain pervasive, especially here in northern Vietnam. Skills in spoken and written English, a prerequisite for a lot of outsourcing work, remain weak, although skills in French, a legacy of colonial rule, remain fairly strong.

The road system is in poor shape, especially in comparison with China, and Vietnam lacks the tidal wave of foreign investment that has helped China build so many modern buildings and factories. Multinationals have built some factories in Vietnam, including small auto assembly plants to supply the local market, but have refrained from setting up big telephone call centers, computer programming operations or other service-sector outsourcing.

"You're not seeing the IBMs, HPs or Infosyses of this world charging in there," said Philip Hassey, the associate director for Asia and the Pacific at the International Data Corp. Yet a handful of companies have set up shop here. A growing number of Vietnamese who fled the country at the end of the war and afterward have begun to return.

Atlas Industries Ltd. has 100 people in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, performing the technical tasks of turning architectural drawings from Britain into detailed blueprints that can be used by British construction companies. Joseph Woolf, the company's chief executive and founder, said that he preferred Vietnam to India because Vietnamese employees were more loyal and less inclined to change jobs repeatedly or seek work overseas, two problems some companies have encountered in India.

"People are more committed to the company, the country and the family," he said. At the same time, Woolf, a former project manager for a succession of British oil companies, said that he was sensitive to concerns that his operation might be taking work from British architects. All his customers in Britain are successful architectural firms that are expanding and adding staff, not laying them off, he insisted. Job losses may be occurring, however, at other firms that are losing market share.

At the 38-employee operation here of World'Vest Base, young men and women sit at computer terminals with high-speed connections to the Internet. Surfing the Web, they fill spreadsheets with prices from obscure stock markets in places like Kazakhstan and Mauritius, then distribute them to investors specializing in emerging markets. For investors seeking gems in bigger stock markets, they glean financial data from French annual reports and comb SEC filings. They also gather data from local companies seeking to prove their creditworthiness to international banks.

Nam Nhat Tran, 28, found the annual report of Groupe Global Graphics in France online and copied the company's cash reserves into a database; her screensaver is a photo of the red wooden footbridge that has long been a symbol of Hanoi and a rendezvous point for lovers. Nguyen Cam Nhung, 23, an experienced hand after six months on the job, sat nearby and coached Tran Trong Tuan, 25 and newly hired. He scrolled up and down through an SEC filing from the American company 3M, looking for depreciation figures from last year. "I'm learning new things about finance," Tuan said.

Jonathan Bloch, the chief executive of Exchange Data International, a company based in London that distributes financial information to big investment banks and other customers, said that data from World'Vest Base was inexpensive and reliable. "We outsource also in India and the Czech Republic," he said. "Vietnam compares very favorably; I think they're on a par."

By Keith Bradsher - The New York Times - September 30, 2004.