The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted, but not derailed Vietnam’s expanding role in global supply chains and growth prospects, American Chamber of Commerce in Hanoi (AmCham Hanoi) executive director Adam Sitkoff said yesterday.
The nation has struggled to maintain manufacturing and exports amid the pandemic, one of the key fronts in the battle to keep international trade running for goods including clothes, computer chips and vehicles.
Vietnam’s commercial hub, Ho Chi Minh City, is to continue to enforce a stay-at-home order at least until Wednesday next week, but allow residents in areas with low reports of virus cases to visit supermarkets once a week.
Photo: AFP
Ho Chi Minh Mayor Phan Van Mai said that the city would gradually restart more services after that date if efforts to contain the virus show signs of success.
“Even with the supply chain and shutdown problems they have because of COVID right now, Vietnam’s still going to do very well economically and it’s becoming, every day, a more important piece of the global supply chain — especially for things that affect American consumers,” Sitkoff told Bloomberg Television’s Haslinda Amin and Rishaad Salamat.
Although “COVID got in the way” of further supply-chain gains and with the full vaccination rate under 3 percent, Sitkoff said that he still expects Vietnam to attract investment, including from further relocations out of China.
For now, AmCham Hanoi is aiming to ensure that COVID-19 policies are “the least disruptive to business as possible,” as firms look for ways to smooth out deliveries leading into the critical year-end holiday season, Sitkoff said.
Analysts at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) sounded a similar tone, highlighting Vietnam’s longer-term prospects despite the current “deep slump” in domestic demand.
“Beyond the near-term challenges, Vietnam’s medium-term economic prospects remain favorable,” analysts including Dhiraj Nim and Khoon Goh (吳昆) wrote in a report.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained