For our tour today we visited multiple tech companies in an industrial park called “Saigon High-Tech Park”. Our first and most interesting company we met with is a company called Coherent. They are a large publicly traded material science company based in Saxonburg, PA. For our visit with them we were treated to a presentation on their operations, history, and plans for further expansion of their operations in Vietnam. Coherent is the globally largest company we have visited and that is an interesting perspective we had yet to see. Coherent has branches allover southeast Asia, but said they came to Vietnam for tax incentives and cheap labor. The presentation included several interesting broadscale insights such as their customers desire to not buy made in China goods. This had led Coherent to move facilities to Vietnam to still operate with the same machinery and similar business environment, but more friendly geopolitics. Coherent’s actual business of incredibly technical optics and cutting edge micron tolerance machining flew way over my business major head, but the decision making process of coming to Vietnam was interesting. After the presentation we toured several of their manufacturing floors where components for heat sensors, microchip manufacturing, and several other cutting edge industries were made. Much of the work was still done by hand, but under modern clean room environment with complicated chemistry going on. We were unable to take pictures of their clean rooms and had to leave the UEF students that normally accompany us back on the bus because of the sensitive industry secrets using in their manufacturing process. We toured several other companies on this excursion to the industrial park, but this one stood out to me the most because of the size of the corporation and advanced nature of the technology.