-- William Morris, The Dream of John Ball (1898) -------------------------------------------------- (From today's NYT):
Outsourcing Finds Vietnam By Keith Bradsher New York Times September 30, 2004
HANOI - With a portrait of Ho Chi Minh gazing down benevolently opposite the doorway and fan blades making leisurely orbits above, the long green room looks as if it could still belong to officials from the Communist-controlled legislature here, its former occupants.
Instead, the room holds one of the more unusual outposts in the shift of clerical jobs to ever-poorer countries in the developing world.
Rows of young university graduates working for World'Vest Base, a company based in Chicago, scan the Internet for everything from emerging market stock prices to corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States. They copy data into spreadsheets and e-mail it to clients around the world.
Vietnam is making a big push to turn itself into an outsourcing powerhouse. Mathematics instruction has long been the strong suit of Vietnam's educational system, and now the country's government is trying to train people across the country in computer skills.
At the same time, wages remain extremely low: World'Vest Base hires recent graduates with accounting or finance degrees, but no experience, for a starting salary of $100 a month, little more than an unskilled factory worker earns in neighboring China.
(snip)
With the approach of the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon next spring, Vietnam remains one of the poorest countries on Earth. It still struggles under a Communist government that has moved more slowly than China's to embrace capitalism.
Government bureaucracy and regulations remain pervasive, especially here in northern Vietnam. Skills in spoken and written English, a prerequisite for a lot of outsourcing work, remain weak, although skills in French, a legacy of colonial rule, remain fairly strong.
The road system is in poor shape, especially in comparison with China, and Vietnam lacks the tidal wave of foreign investment that has helped China build so many modern buildings and factories. Multinationals have built some factories in Vietnam, including small auto assembly plants to supply the local market, but have refrained from setting up big telephone call centers, computer programming operations or other service-sector outsourcing.
In coming to Vietnam, Philippe O. Piette, the chief executive of World'Vest, who was born in Antwerp, the Netherlands, has followed an odyssey that says much about how far some companies are willing to look these days for cheap labor.
(snip)
Five decades after independence from France, Hanoi is still poor, with practically no skyscrapers and streets still filled with motorcycles and bicycles. When Mr. Piette tried to place an overseas call from his hotel, it took him nine hours to get an international phone line.
Dismayed but not deterred by the delay, he kept investigating.
He found that Vietnam had not only plenty of French speakers and some English speakers, but also lots of people who spoke Russian and German, having worked in the former Soviet Union and the former East Germany. While World'Vest Base still has 56 employees in Kuala Lumpur, its biggest expansion now is in Vietnam, where Mr. Piette now pays up to $400 a month to some of his first hires who are especially productive and have stuck with the company.
Being a native French speaker has helped in navigating the government bureaucracy.
"The whole country runs on who you know, not what you know," Mr. Piette said. "It's true of most countries, but it's particularly true here."
Full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/business/worldbusiness/30vietnam.html