Showing posts with label Vietnam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vietnam. Show all posts

Thursday, March 07, 2024

For multinationals, China cannot be replaced by India or Vietnam – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

Multinationals do not have to look at Vietnam and India as a replacement for China, says business analyst Shaun Rein at CNBC. In the next ten years China’s middle class is going to grow massively, and cannot be beaten by anybody else, he adds. “About 400 million poorer Chinese are getting into the middle class in the years to come,” he says.

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touchmailto:fons.tuinstra@china-speakers-bureau.com or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more financial experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Tuesday, January 07, 2020

Multinationals underestimate local Asian competition - Shaun Rein

Shaun Rein
Multinationals knew they were up for a hard time in fighting local brands in China, but local brands all over Asia are becoming more successful, says business analyst Shaun Rein to Industry Week. Consumers are changing their preferences to local brands.

Industry Week:

Nestle SA is losing buzz to an Indonesian coffee brand famous for brewing civet-cat feces, and L’Oreal SA is losing face to a Chinese skincare brand favored by President Xi Jinping’s wife.
Asia traditionally was considered easy money for Western multinationals, with beverage makers, cigarette brands and fast-food giants capitalizing on rising incomes and weak local competitors. A survey by China Market Research Group in 2011 showed 85% of Chinese consumers preferring foreign brands. 
Those days are over. That preference dropped by half last year, and it goes beyond China: brands of Indian toothpaste, Vietnamese laundry detergent and Japanese flavored water are picking up market share with lower prices and by catering to local tastes. 
Rising stars such as Indonesia’s Luwak instant coffee and China’s Pechoin moisturizers spell trouble for global titans at a time when Asia-Pacific’s economic growth is projected to outpace the world’s through 2019. 
“Multinationals underestimated local competition,” said Shaun Rein, managing director for China Market Research Group. “Local players have moved very fast on emerging trends that multinationals have missed, like healthy and e-commerce.”

More in Industry Week.

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more consumption experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

Monday, September 16, 2019

Companies flee, rather than fight China - Sara Hsu

Sara Hsu
US President Donald Trump wants US companies to fight China, but they rather flee for greener pastures not to their home countries, says financial analyst Sara Hsu at the ChinaUSFacus. But some might decide to swap countries too early, she warns.

China US Focus:
Moving to another country may make sense for companies whose new grounds of operation have sufficient infrastructure to provide a proper manufacturing environment. 
Firms reshoring to Japan and Taiwan find themselves back home with well-constructed roads and telecommunications systems, although such factors may yield higher costs of production. Those shifting to Vietnam and Thailand are faced with poorer conditions and potential added costs of production. 
Vietnam has a lack of transport infrastructure, power supply networks, and urban infrastructure. Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi face severe traffic congestion. Government funding and planning fall short of providing sufficient resources to improve the infrastructure environment. It has been estimated that the country needs to invest $400 billion in infrastructure over the next decade. However, corruption and lack of skills prevent this from occurring. 
Thailand has better infrastructure than Vietnam, but it has experienced bottlenecks in pushing infrastructure development further. This is because it takes the central government a long time to approve projects, and state governments lack the capacity to build the infrastructure projects that are slated for construction. Thailand’s political elite view infrastructure projects as long term, while their tenure may be short term. 
As companies move to developing Asian nations to take advantage of Asian supply chains, they are facing challenges. In Vietnam, companies have a harder time locating factories, and ports are struggling to coordinate container ship traffic. Costs of labor in Thailand are higher than in China, even after wage increases in China. Firms attempting to move to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Cambodia are facing similar problems. In Cambodia, for example, almost of half of all goods inspected in the last quarter did not satisfy inspection standards. 
This means that the trade war is forcing some companies to shift production to less attractive locations prematurely. It’s one thing to move abroad in order to increase profitability, but quite another to move out from an established location due to complications resulting from an anti-free trade stance taken by the center country. So far, companies that make Crocs, Roomba vacuums, and Yeti beer coolers are moving out of China due to increased tariffs.
More at the ChinaUSFocus.

Sara Hsu is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more financial analysts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

US companies not ready to leave China - Arthur Kroeber

Arthur Kroeber
One of the purposes of Trump's trade war is convincing US companies to leave China. But they are not yet ready to move, says economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know®, in the Channel News Asia. And when they move, they might before countries like Vietnam over the US, he adds.

Channels News Asia:
The trade hawks are cleverly using targeted tariffs to make it more difficult for companies to export from China.


(US Trade Representative)“Lighthizer wants US corporations to move into other locations,” says Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Gavekal Dragonomics. His Beijing-based research group has clients who are considering doing just that, though no one has yet pulled the trigger. 
“Vietnam is the obvious alternative but there are still too many potholes,” he says. Companies “don’t want to be the one to fill in the potholes. They want to wait for others to pioneer and then see if it makes sense to move.”
More at the Channel News Asia.

Arthur Kroeber is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more strategy experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Tuesday, July 04, 2017

Will China face a pushback? - Howard French

Howard French
China's erstwhile "peaceful rise" has been less peaceful over the past years. Will China face a pushback from its neighbors, asks former foreign correspondent Mary Kay Magistad author Howard French of Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power in a wide ranging interview about his book in PRI.

PRI:
French: That's really the $64,000 question, and it's kind of the core of my book really. I think that we are entering, right now, a moment of very serious danger, which in my view, and I kind of roll out this argument in an extended way in my book, is likely to last for the next 10, 15, at the longest 20 years, after which, I think, if we can get through this transitional period, tensions will subside. 
But we are entering the danger period. And we're entering the danger period because China has advanced so far, so quickly. And its strength, economically speaking, in terms of industrial competitiveness, military capability, and particularly in terms of capacities for self-defense and projection of force in the nearby seas, have come to draw close to the capacities of the United States. In a situation where you’ve had a rising power and a status quo power in history, where the gap between the two narrows rapidly and dramatically, that is the precise situation of highest danger — because neither side is absolutely certain that it is able to prevail in a moment of instability or of conflict. 
In the rising power, you have strong constituencies that are tied up in the investment and effort to acquire capabilities, which say, 'what's the point of acquiring all of these capabilities, if you don't use them?' 
And meanwhile, in the status quo power, what was once a very clear and unambiguous lead in all of these key areas from economic strength and competitiveness, to high tech to military capacity, as the gap narrows, anxiety begins to increase. And ... a corresponding constituency says, in effect, ‘if we don't do something now to nip this threat in the bud, then it's going to be too late. We have to assert ourselves now to make clear who's in charge, or to make clear what the rules are.’ 
What's happening in the surrounding region is that, again I think one most usefully must resort to the realism that political scientists speak of. The neighboring powers are watching kind of anxiously to understand which way the wind blows. And so, how did they respond to this? Well the first thing they want to do is to avoid having to explicitly choose sides. And that means that most of them will want to obtain the benefits of economic cooperation with China, because China has been growing so fast and represents a huge market that's right on their doorstep, and to simultaneously enjoy the benefits of security arrangements with the United States, because the United States is this off-shore power far away that has been the trustee and guardian of the established rules of the road and who doesn't seem threatening. 
And so you see lots of countries — Vietnam is the most interesting example of this — Indians are training Vietnamese submarine crews on how to run submarines that are used, among other ways, to deter Chinese attacks. The Japanese are helping pay for a new Philippines Coast Guard, and a Vietnamese Coast Guard as well. Australia plays in this game. All of the smaller countries, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand are seeking ways to balance against China — soft balancing against China in ways that are not meant to be offensive to China, but allow them to hedge their bets. 
Magistad: You mentioned an important point in your book, which is, if China doesn't show respect for the rules and norms of the region, it pretty much encourages those countries to seek assistance, to seek support, to seek backup from the United States, and that actually plays against China's interests. How much do you think China's leaders are aware of that? 
French:  So there's a political scientist named Edward Luttwak, who I quote in the book at one point, who has developed a theory. He's basically a strategic thinker. And he's developed a theory, which is not exclusive to China, but describes a mentality or mindset that's common to very fast rising powers, as they begin to emerge, and to begin to more and more obviously contend with the status quo power. This mentality that he speaks of is called Great Power Autism. And, apologies to anyone who might take offense at this — this is not my term. 
The point he's trying to make is that rising this far this fast is a giddy experience. And amid the giddiness that you experience during this rise, caution and all sorts of other perspectives are kind of lost. And so, you are not likely to be terribly perceptive of the cost that you may incur by offending other people, meaning in this case, your immediate neighbors, much smaller countries, because you think that when you rise as far and as fast as a country like China has risen, that this is an affirmation of your correctness. 
So the next 10 years could be very messy, by accident or by design, to one degree or another. China could push in a way that involves hard power, to make gains in the immediate region at the expense of the status quo powers, most importantly for this conversation, the United States and Japan, which are the most important status quo powers in the region. And there could be a war. Or there could be at least some more limited form of conflict that could be ugly and very dangerous. 
That's one scenario that's very real, cannot be discounted, which we must be very attentive to, and that our diplomats have to figure out a way to prevent. 
You can imagine a leadership that says 'look, in 10-15 years, we can be down to 2 to 3 percent economic growth per year. ... This is the moment when we have to go we have to make our big push. We have to lock in whatever gains we can lock in right now, meaning in the next 10 years.' 
Still, I'm hopeful that we'll muddle through. Once we're past this transitional period of 10, maybe 15 years, then other things begin to happen. The demographics of China, I think, kick in — with hundreds of millions of people over the age of 65, with immense costs in medical care, possibly residential care, and China doesn’t have that infrastructure yet, because it hasn’t yet been at that stage of economic development. And so, if we get past this transitional period of 10 or 15 years, I'm very hopeful that China will say, 'listen, the status quo isn't as bad as we thought it was. We don't need to be such a grudging, victim-centric country. We've done well. We've come a long way.
More in PRI.

Howard French is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more strategic experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Monday, February 13, 2017

After China, Trump may turn to the rest of Asia - Shaun Rein

Shaun Rein
Business analyst Shaun Rein told already in his bestseller The End of Cheap China, Revised and Updated: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World, much of the cheap production was moving from China to other countries. Vietnam, Indonesia and Sri Lanka hope Donald Trump does not find out for the time being, Rein writes in IBT.

Shaun Rein:
Asian nations want predictability and stability in their relationships with America. (Peter) Navarro (director of the US National Trade Council) especially is one who causes unease throughout the region — he has not visited mainland China in more than a decade and does not speak Mandarin. His criticisms about China keeping its currency artificially low and stealing American manufacturing jobs in light industry is outdated. If anything China is blocking capital outflows, raising interest rates in order to strengthen its currency, the Yuan. South-East Asian nations now are exporting to China as that economy transitions to one based on consumption. 
The reality is most low-end manufacturing has already moved out of China to countries like Vietnam, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Officials in those nations are worried that Navarro will convince Trump to turn criticisms to them once he is done criticising China 
Going forward, Trump needs to show nations in Asia that America is ready to continue to be a long-term predictable partner that will support them in times of danger. By 2050, China's and India's economies most likely will have surpassed America's. Smaller nations are deciding now whether to align with China or the United States. Trump can no longer stay silent on his intentions in the region.
More in IBT

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

Are you looking for more strategy experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.


Tuesday, October 14, 2014

China´s dangerous maritime endeavors - Howard French

Howard French
+Howard French 
China has been aggressively been expanding its maritime power of the past two years. While it is now surprise it takes on that other maritime powerhouse, the US, but  - writes journalist Howard French in a comprehensive analysis in the Atlantic - there is enough to worry. For example how it deals with Vietnam.

Howard French:
China’s main frontline opponents in the South China Sea are Vietnam and the Philippines. Analysts in both countries strongly fear that Beijing will seek to make an example of at least one of them, following the venerable Chinese adage that one kills a chicken to scare the monkeys. The question would seem to be which neighbor will serve as the sacrificial chicken; which country China will bully and humiliate as an object lesson to other neighbors that resistance is futile and decisive help from the Americans is unlikely to come. 
Today, Vietnam is the only country in the region that seeks to impose serious limits on China’s maritime ambitions but does not have a defense agreement with the United States, making it an attractive target. On the other hand, even if it is scarcely more than one-30th of China’s size, Vietnam has a redoubtable martial culture, as the United States learned in the 1960s. The Chinese, too, should be familiar with the disposition toward resistance: Vietnam repelled a Chinese invasion of the country’s northern borderlands in 1979, leaving as many as 20,000 Chinese soldiers dead. Yet this incident has long since been censored out of China’s national consciousness. And just as they did at the beginning of that assiduously forgotten war, outlets of the Chinese state media have spoken recently of the need to give Vietnam “a lesson it deserves,” or to make it pay “an unaffordable price.” 
Although the two countries are nominal ideological allies, their relationship through the centuries has involved many waves of invasion and subjugation, deeply coloring the attitudes of each toward the other. “Invasion is in their blood, and resistance is in our blood” is how a Vietnamese political analyst summed up the countries’ two millennia of bitterly shared history for The New York Times in May. 
No one among the score of diplomats and officials I met in Vietnam has any illusion of prevailing in a symmetrical clash with China, naval or otherwise. But Vietnam has at times found unconventional means to overcome bigger and more heavily armed adversaries. This history of defying the odds has fired a mood of self-confidence in Hanoi that sometimes smacks of arrogance. 
“We are a very small country, but every time China has wanted to use force against Vietnam, we have stopped them,” a prominent Vietnamese military analyst told me in Kuala Lumpur early this year. We met in a formal reception room in his country’s embassy, furnished with a springy couch, a noisy air conditioner, and fading revolutionary art. High on the wall, in pride of place, hung a portrait of a smiling Ho Chi Minh. “In the Malvinas conflict, Argentina fired only three Exocet missiles; one of them sunk a British ship,” he said. “If the Chinese come with Liaoning, we will defeat them.” 
Hanoi recently took delivery of two silent Russian-built, Kilo-class submarines—four more are on the way—and the military analyst unambiguously explained such an expensive purchase for a country with a per capita GDP of only about $1,900: his country needs to be able to sink Chinese ships in order to raise the cost of Chinese aggression to unacceptable levels. “Little by little we are loosening the noose” that China has put around his country’s neck, he told me. 
Vietnam has to weigh its response to Chinese provocation with great care, given the two countries’ increasing economic integration. In 2012, at a particularly tense moment with Manila, China suspended imports of bananas from the Philippines, causing huge quantities of the crop to rot on docks. And as soon as tensions rose once the oil rig had been towed into Vietnamese waters, trade between the two countries declined sharply, with Chinese state media warning of possible long-term economic consequences. 
To the Vietnamese, the oil-rig incident did not reach a threshold that warranted war. Multiple Vietnamese officials told me that a Chinese bid to seize disputed islands from Vietnam (as it did in 1974 and 1988) probably would. The oil rig’s deployment fomented gigantic protests in Vietnam, where large public demonstrations are rare. On the first day, May 11, hundreds of people turned out peacefully in Hanoi, carrying banners with slogans like “Protect the nation.” Over the next several days, large crowds converged on several industrial parks, attacking Chinese businesses. Vietnamese analysts said that the unrest, in which numerous protesters died, carried a sharp warning that the state’s legitimacy might crumble if it failed to strike back after any new Chinese island grab. 
Many Western analysts view China’s approach in the Pacific as a sort of calibrated incrementalism, whereby a Chinese presence and de facto Chinese rights in disputed areas are built up gradually, in a series of provocations that are individually small enough to make forceful resistance politically difficult, but that collectively establish precedents and, over time, norms. The Chinese, in fact, have a name for this approach: the cabbage strategy. An area is slowly surrounded by individual “leaves”—a fishing boat here, a coast-guard vessel there—until it’s wrapped in layers, like a cabbage. (“Salami slicing” is another metaphor for the approach.) 
Surely the Chinese would be satisfied if Vietnam simply accepted their slow expansion of maritime rights and territory. But the tempo and tenor of China’s recent actions suggest that Beijing might now also be happy with a contest of strength against Hanoi, especially if Vietnam were perceived as the country that struck first. This, ultimately, is how China’s positioning of its oil rig, backed by an armada, should be understood: it would help legitimize Chinese claims if Vietnam did nothing, and would offer an opportunity to loudly squash the bug in some limited battle—and perhaps to impose crippling economic sanctions—if Hanoi lashed out. 
Indeed, given Beijing’s great advantage of force, some Vietnamese officials have recently warned that although military action by their side is emotionally attractive, and perhaps even inevitable, it may do nothing more than spring a Chinese trap. If the question of standing up to China becomes too tightly bound with regime survival, all that might be accomplished is public failure and, ironically, regime change in Vietnam.
Much more in the Atlantic.

Howard French is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

Are you interested in more stories by Howard French: do check our regularly updated list.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Lessons from the Sino-Vietnam war - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia
Zhang Lijia
Author Zhang Lijia just returned back from a short trip to Vietnam, and tries to draw lessons from the Sino-Vietnam war. "I hope my Chinese compatriots holding hawkish nationalist views over Diaoyu Island would look back and learn exactly what happened," she writes on her weblog.

Zhang Lijia:
During our tour, the word ‘China’ kept popping up and not always in positive light. During an excursion to a cave in Ha Long Bay, our young, well-informed guide Diep talked about how the locals used the cave as a shelter during the bombings by the Americans. He went on talking about the stories of sufferings by the Vietnamese people during the war. I asked him how the locals now view the Americans – we were with our friends from America, Diep said people no longer hold grudges against America. The war was over and they are now trading partners. Many do hold grudging against China – the biggest threat to the country. China and Vietnam have disputed borders and many worry that one day that China may invade again, just like 1979. I guess China’s aggressive attitude over the disputed Diaoyu Island with Japan doesn’t really put Vietnamese at ease. 
I hope my Chinese compatriots holding hawkish nationalist views over Diaoyu Island would look back and learn exactly what happened in 1979 – not just from the official source. And think about these shattered lives, broken dreams, grieved parents and lost lives. No island, uninhabited or otherwise, is worth any spilling of blood and the negative impact that would surely to follow. To rise peacefully means to build harmonious relationships with our neighbours and respect them. Only in this way, there’ll be long term stability in the region.
More on Zhang Lijia's weblog.

Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

The China Weekly Hangout discussed three months ago China's relation with the US. Present are political scientist Greg Anderson, China veteran Janet Carmosky and Fons Tuinstra, president of the China Speakers Bureau.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Rising wages disrupt supply chains - Shaun Rein

Rising wages in China will disrupt supply chains and consumer habits worldwide, tells business analyst Shaun Rein, author of "The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends that will Disrupt the World" in IFW.

IFW:
In his recently-released book [Shaun Rein] suggests companies may need to rethink their strategies and shift manufacturing to lower-cost production centres like Vietnam or Indonesia – “or even back to the United States in some cases”. 
On the flip side, he emphasises that China has become the market to sell into, rather than one to produce in. 
“China is known for manufacturing cheap products, thanks largely to the country’s vast supply of low-cost workers. But China is changing, and the glut of cheap labour that has made everyday low prices possible is drying up, as the Chinese people seek not to make iPhones, but to buy them.”
More in IFW

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

More about Shaun Rein and "The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends that will Disrupt the World " in Storify.

 
Enhanced by Zemanta

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Vietnam and US getting closer, thanks to China - Wendell Minnick

Wendell_MinnickrevWendell Minnickvia Flickr
China's maritime actions are enticing Vietnam to edge closer to the US, writes Wendell Minnick in Defense News. 
The United States is taking advantage of Vietnamese angst over Chinese arrests of Vietnamese fishermen, threats against multinational oil companies operating in Vietnamese waters, increased naval exercises and the establishment of a submarine base on Hainan Island.Beijing appears to have abandoned its “smile campaign” toward Southeast Asia; Vietnam is responding accordingly, said Richard Bitzinger, a regional defense analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore.


Tension between the countries is likely to rise, later in the year, writes Minnick:
The United States and Vietnam are to hold their first military-to-military talks in the final quarter of this year. Vietnam could agree to send officers to advanced education courses in the United States, said Carl Thayer, an expert on Vietnam at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra.


More background here.
Commercial
Wendell Minnick is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you want to share his thoughts on China as a military power, please get in touch.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

China drives Vietnam into Pentagon's arms - Wendell Minnick

Wendell_MinnickWendell Minnick Fantake via Flickr
China's higher military profile is pushing Vietnam into the influence sphere of the United States, even though they have been fighting a war against each other in the past, says Wendell Minnick, Asia bureau chief of Defense News in AOL News.

"There are still bumps in the road in U.S.-Vietnam relations," Minnick wrote in an e-mail. "There are still legacy issues with the older leaders of Vietnam who fought in the Vietnam War and still harbor anger at the U.S."
"But the opportunities for Vietnam greatly outnumber the negatives, and it's clear that many in the Pentagon see China's aggressive moves in the South China Sea as a plus for better ties with Vietnam," Minnick said. "The old saying still holds true: 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend.'"
Both Vietnam and the U.S. had run-ins with China in the South China Sea last year.
Commercial
Wendell Minnick is also a speaker on military affairs in Asia and is part of the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.