This is a guest post by Christopher Beselin, who is a multi-exit company builder that resides in Vietnam. Christopher was part of the founding team of Lazada (acquired by Alibaba), Intrepid (acquired), Fram (IPO’d) and Endurance Capital Group.
Guest Author: Christopher Beselin
Vietnam’s information technology sector has experienced remarkable growth over the past two decades, evolving into a significant contributor to the country’s economic development.
This growth has been underpinned by a considerable talent pool, robust educational systems, and supportive government policies. From a broader perspective, the Vietnamese IT engineering talents constitute approx. half of the larger general engineering graduate talent pool of the country (there are ca. 100,000 engineering graduates per year in Vietnam).
To me, this engineering talent pool has long been the number one asset of Vietnam.
The country’s well-educated, cost-efficient and hard-working engineering talent pool is the primary attraction for large groups of foreign companies that invest into Vietnam. Most surveys will place Vietnamese engineers at ca. 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost of a Chinese equivalent.
The attractiveness of the Vietnamese engineering talent pulls foreign capital to invest into onshore engineering-centered manufacturing, which in turn has vast ripple effects on the employment of thousands of additional factory workers around the engineers.
The attractiveness of the local engineers is hence the bedrock of a core part of the Vietnamese growth model – the foreign-invested and engineering-focused exports. Approx. 45% of Vietnamese exports are either smartphone & electronics or machinery components today.
Other, more traditional product categories, such as textiles, footwear and furniture are much smaller drivers (each ca 5-10% of total exports).
In this sense, the Vietnamese export and growth model carries great resemblance to the ones of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
