Friday, May 27 2011

Today we got a chance to go out of Ho Chi Minh City to Binh Duong Province to visit Becamex, a company that is involved in building industrial parks outside of Ho Chi Minh City.  This industrial park was about an hour and a half outside of Ho Chi Minh.  Becamex is a state owned company that is developing these industrial parks or new cities around Ho Chi Minh that provide all the facilities that foreign investors are looking for before investing in Vietnam.  Due to high corruption in Vietnam, these cities offer one-stop-shop administrative offices that take care of all issues related to setting up a business in that city, ranging from incorporation to hook up of utilities, to finding local talent to run businesses.  The management at Becamex shared their plans of how they developed these cities and what their forecasts for the next five years are.  The plans that they shared were similar to what we could expect in the United States or in any other developed country.  We also got a chance to visit the industrial and residential complexes that they had built to attract foreign investors.  

Presentation At Becamex

Becamex also hosted a lavish lunch for us in a local restaurant in their city.  The lunch was the best so far.

After lunch, we visited Acrylic Idea Factory, a manufacturing facility of an American owned business.  The factory was located in the Becamex industrial park.  I was impressed to see that the manufacturing facility of the company was built on the standards of any American company.  The company provided all safety as well as professional work environment to the workers as I would see here in America.  A noteworthy thing that I noticed during our visit to the factory was that the director, who started the operations a few years ago, had so much pride in his factory and was incredibly proud of his team’s achievements.   He had tears in his eyes when he was explaining how he started this project and how well they have performed in the past few years.  This sense of pride was noticeable in all of the Vietnamese people that I have had discussions so far in our trip.

Acrylic Factory

We also got a chance to visit an impressive newly built Eastern International University towards the end of the day.  This university was built by Becamax group as part of their plan to develop this industrial park at a cost of $100Million.  The university was built over twenty five acres of land and had colleges for nursing, engineering and business administration.  The inaugural class of the university will be starting this fall and the management expects to have twenty-four thousand students with the next few years.  The university colleges were equipped with the latest technology in the classrooms and laboratories. The management explained that the university will serve as the talent feeding house for the industries in the Becamax industrial parks and the cost of education will be subsidized by Becamax Corporation.