Trade delegation touts Vietnam's potential in S.F.
Ho Chi Minh City promotes low costs, educated workforce
Vietnam and its biggest city have come through a postwar burst of blind optimism and subsequent sharp disillusionment, and are entering a new era of professionalism and growth, according to American and Vietnamese executives at a trade summit in San Francisco Thursday.
About 75 members of a trade delegation from Ho Chi Minh City met their American counterparts at City Hall for the final session of a road show that also took them to New York and Toronto. The group touted Vietnam's young, motivated, well-educated workforce, low operating costs and newly streamlined bureaucracy as compelling reasons why U.S. corporations should invest in the communist nation of 81 million people.
While Vietnamese trade delegates and a capacity audience of American executives mingled, exchanged business cards and listened to PowerPoint presentations about infrastructure, local laws and tourist attractions, several dozen protesters wielding bull horns and waving the yellow flag of the former South Vietnam outside City Hall called for human rights and democracy.
Inside, feelings were warm.
Mark Chandler, the city's director of international trade, who works in the mayor's office, noted that San Francisco has an official sister-city relationship with Ho Chi Minh City that dates from April 1995 -- three months before the United States and Vietnam established diplomatic relations after the war between the two countries in the 1960s and early 1970s.
"As usual, Washington was following San Francisco,'' Chandler quipped.
A bicultural, bilingual parade of speakers praised Ho Chi Minh City as a haven for investment and expansion: More than 90 percent of adults are literate, they said, and the city is upgrading its big river port, building expressways, opening a new terminal at its airport in 2007 and building a new international airport with a completion date of 2016.
Several speakers touted Vietnam as an attractive alternative to neighboring China, where wages and costs of doing business are rising sharply as the country expands and prospers. Some studies peg wages in parts of Vietnam -- though not Ho Chi Minh City -- at one-fourth to one-third of those in China.
Some Bay Area companies are already heavily involved in Vietnam, especially Ho Chi Minh City, home to 6 million people. Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel Corp., for example, visited Vietnam, where Intel plans to operate a $600 million chip-making plant, several weeks ago.
Joe Mannix, Vietnam manager for United Airlines, which began a daily flight from San Francisco International Airport to Ho Chi Minh City via Hong Kong in December 2004, said the service "is meeting our expectations.''
Declining to disclose how many seats are filled, Mannix said customers are often Vietnamese Americans traveling to see relatives, with business rising at holidays and in summer and falling off other times of the year.
Immediately after the City Hall gathering, United -- which faces stiff competition from Asian carriers on the Vietnam route -- planned to host a seminar on Vietnam tourism for travel agents and tour operators, Mannix said.
By David Armstrong - San Francisco Chronicle - Mars 24, 2006.
|