Today began with another lecture by Professor Minh at UEF and it was great! We learned about global supply chains and how they can be made sustainable and resilient. It was very interesting to hear about real problems companies have faced in the past and how they reacted to them as well as hearing about how effective those reactions were. He also discussed some likely problems that companies will face such as wars, natural disasters, and political tensions. He also went over why so many firms are moving their manufacturing to Vietnam, as I had not really thought about it aside from cheaper labor. I learned a multitude of reasons why companies choose Vietnam which I found fascinating as the stability and geography were not really something I considered when thinking about manufacturing in Vietnam. I really enjoy how Professor Minh keeps us engaged with his lectures as he frequently has prompts for us to answer but the answers aren’t immediately obvious so I actually have to think about how I would answer the prompt. Often times I want to raise my hand and answer out loud because I put real thought into my answer and I want to hear his insight on my thoughts. Similarly to yesterday, we had a group project at the end of the lecture. We had to create a scenario where a company had an issue with their supply chain and we had to figure out how they would react and move forward. My group decided on Apple facing a semiconductor shortage. This group projects are very thought provoking as we have to apply what we learned in the lecture to a real world possibility. I had new UEF students to sit with, Roy and Danny, I hadn’t met either before but they were a ton of fun to hang out with! It was Danny’s first day being with the Pitt students so I hope he had fun. We talked about the differing traditions for birthdays in America and Vietnam after the cake for Becky was revealed. I learned that cake is still had at birthdays but after childhood the cakes become smaller and more for tradition rather than to eat. After that we went to lunch which I was very excited for (see below)

After that delicious lunch, we went to Đien Quang’s headquarters. Seeing the production of so many varying types of technology was incredible! If you’ve read the other blog posts about today then you know it was quite hot today which made the tour a bit harder to follow as we were constantly moving between the inside and the outside and much of the facility had limited climate control. This setback did not stop me from learning a great deal about electronics manufacturing in Vietnam. The speakers there went over Đien Quang’s business strategy which focuses on building partnerships and providing high quality products which I thought was interesting because Vietnam is known for its cheap labor which generally leads to lower quality products similar to how goods with the “Made in China” label are often written off as low quality. It makes me wonder if they try to overcome that prejudice or if they try to let the products speak for themselves. Another part of the tour I liked was seeing the smart home design they had. They had an assistant device similar to Alexa and showed off some of its capabilities. Seeing them develop a tool that has kind of fallen out of the public eye in America was very cool as if it was being made for an American audience it most likely would not be super successful but in Vietnam the market for home assistants has not yet reached its peak. I would’ve liked to see some features that may have been designed specifically for the Vietnamese audience to compare it to the American version. They also had all sorts of products for all different types of lighting. The most interesting type I saw was the way lighting affects the customers perception of food. They had several displays of fake food that looked fresh under certain colors of lights and unappealing under different colors. The thought of that had simply never crossed my mind before and it was cool to see the freshness of the food appear and disappear under very similarly colored lights. The weather may have made the tour a bit rough but I am still glad I got to see Đien Quang!