Hello Everybody,
Yesterday was our last day of company visits, our last day with our amazing bus driver 007, and with our purple clad bus that looks like it was decorated by a grandma. The overwhelming feeling as I got off the bus today for the last time was that I did not want to go back home and extreme tiredness after the company visits, also excitement because VSIP had a tiny figurine store which we all spent time looking through while on our visit.
We visited VSIP, Vietnam Singapore Industrial Parks, and one of the companies located within a VSIP, II-VI. VSIP is a partnership between Singapore and Vietnam that allows Singapore to help Vietnam set up Industrial Parks and townships modelled after the successful Industrial Parks and townships of Vietnam. The countries around Vietnam are known to work together occasionally on projects like this, especially those within those ASEAN Alliance. This helps Vietnam’s economy further develop.
The other company we visited, whose factories and offices are located within VSIP, II-VI is a highly engineered materials company, that requires a lot of very technical labor. They produce lasers and optics products, ranging from the smallest green laser to thin glass covers. Individual employees are behind almost every step of producing these products, from the moment the unshaped glass arrives to when the final product undergoes final quality check. Because of the importance of the people that work at II-VI and their highly technical jobs II-VI faces a challenge with employee retention because every lunar new year their employees go home and will often times just decide to stay home until they run out of money and have to go back to work. When they go back to work they often have to find new jobs which means that II-VI has lost a valuable employee who went through all this training. To combat this they structured bonuses so that they are received after lunar new year to incentivize the employees to return.
As an American company II-VI was offered a period of no taxes for the first couple of years it was in Vietnam, couple that with Vietnam’s low operational costs and the cheap labor and it makes perfect sense for II-VI to have a factory in Vietnam. The only negatives are having to deal with the communist government and all the paperwork involved with being a foreign company in Vietnam.