Our eighth day was the hottest one yet with temperatures over 100° F, and featured two very interesting site visits. The first was to a brand called Coherent, which specializes in high-tech manufacturing for various industries. They make parts for lasers, fiber optics, electric vehicles, and more. They are a rapidly expanding company with their profits and employee numbers projected to exponentially increase over the next few years. I thought this was very interesting as they are currently preparing for this growth, despite it being years away, by building new facilities around Vietnam and the world. We also got to see a tour of their different factories in Ho Chi Minh, which I thought was very interesting.

The second site visit was to the Saigon Hi-Tech Park, a park for technology companies to set up locations in Vietnam. We first got a presentation by those in charge of the park, before seeing various companies inside the park. I thought that one of the most interesting parts of the visit was when they explained how the relationship between the companies and the park works. The park requires a percentage of the company’s spending to go into R&D, as the park wants to promote investment into new solutions and products. After seeing some of the companies in the park we went to see the parks incubation center, a place where students can come to work on projects and new ideas, and use the machines and equipment there to do so. We also saw the showroom for the incubation center, which featured lots of interesting projects from past years. After that we went to the training center, which is sort of like a trade school that trains students to work in the high tech industry in the park. This was very cool as it was direct training for working in the park, with similar facilities and machinery to what we saw during our other tours.

Today was another great day in Ho Chi Minh City and I can’t believe that the trip is already starting to come to an end.