Day Three: Wednesday

On Wednesday morning we had a site visit at Vietnamese Singapore Industrial Park (VSIP). Because it was an industrial site, I thought it was going to be something very dirty, but it was actually a very clean and beautiful park. The park held the factories for many different foreign companies, both American and other. I was most surprised by the fact that a large number of companies from the BVI's had invested in the park. Though we had learned that the city had no emissions laws, the industrial park did, in order to keep the area clean and to make it appealing to future investors.

We had the opportunity to visit one of the factories in the park, owned by II-IV, a Pittsburgh based company. The plant manufactured lenses and computer parts, the making of both involved things I had learned in physics, so I found the processes interesting. We also got an inside view on hiring and retention of Vietnamese workers. Many of them live outside the city and move to the city to work and so that they can send money home to their families. Because of this, many of them go home for Tet, the lunar New Year. II-VI found that after the holiday, many employees simply did not return. In order to decrease this loss, they implemented different bonuses, the most effective of which was a bonus, half given before the holiday, and half after. They found that with this incentive they had 100% retention after the holiday, and that though one woman was planning to get married, she came back to tell them that, rather than just staying home.

In the afternoon, we visited Glass Egg Digital Media, a company we had read about in our case studies pre-departure. I was particularly excited to hear about how the company had evolved in the two years since the case study was written. Unfortunately, the CEO was stuck in a meeting so we met with other heads of the company, and it felt very much like they were blowing off questions we had thoughtfully prepared. Even though it wasn't the best site visit, it was interesting to see the portfolio of video games they had done the graphics for.