Q - What do you do if you're a mega-corporation and you can't find enough trained employees? A - Start your own university. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphjennings/2020/01/17/vietnams-mega-conglomerate-starts-its-own-university-to-overcome-talent-shortage/#5f2c08771620
The Vietnamese Dong (that's their currency) equals $.000043 U.S. Gee, I wonder how much these new Vin U grads will make? The present minimum wage in Vietnam is $132 a month. I also wonder how long (in nanoseconds) it will take them to see the light and emigrate. Another economy predicated on cheap wages and depressed currency. A very few manage to become extremely wealthy. Proportionally, even fewer than here.
According to the CIA (if we believe them...) Vietnam's per-capita GDP on a purchasing-power-parity basis in 2017 (the last year they had) was $6,900. And their economy is growing at something like 6%, based largely on low cost manufacturing. That's the same playbook that the Chinese used, except that now the poorer Vietnamese are underselling the Chinese. I guess that the Chinese have plowed the hundreds of billions of dollars a year for decades that they have been making bleeding the United States, into more sophisticated high-end manufacturing - so that now they make i-phones for the US (and no end of high tech gear for their own military). https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/vm.html It's easy for me to see how if Vietnam wants more manufacturing expertise (and ask Kizmet, there's lots of materials and welding and fabricating stuff that goes into it), they might have to put some work into home-growing the know-how. Makes perfect sense to me.
For what it's worth, China's time has peaked as a source of cheap labor. Low skilled production work is rapidly moving towards other Asian countries, while certain skilled trades in China are approaching wages that well... are not far off from what we'll seeing in some of the cheaper corners of America. Somethings seem to be coming true at times. China has some of the most advanced manufacturing facilities in the world now, and the engineering expertise to run with it. They have a long history of cheap goods, because of their model of development and quite simply.. they were a contract manufacturer. They were building to the quality specs that foreign businesses were requesting, not what they were capable of. While we in America are still ahead of them in factory automation, they are rapidly catching up and have eclipsed us by a significant margin when it comes to purchasing industrial robots. On a bewildering level, we actually are now seeing China push for higher international standards on electronics quality control requirements, because their factories can adhere to the higher standards while most American factories can not. It's horrible to see industries and associations arguing against improved quality control, but there are honestly grave repercussions.
