Surprise: Vietnam records trade surplus with China

[Nilgiri]

Global Times has found the culprit: Vietnam’s rapid industrialization.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1092789.shtml

Excellent job btw. Hope Vietnam march continues as fast as possible.

 

[Tom99]

It is natural for China and Vietnam to continue to increase trade between themselves as they are neighbors. As Vietnam develops and prospers then Vietnamese can/will import more goods from China.

Chinese ppl themselves don't buy most Chinese products , they import from Japan , Korea & the west

More Indian bullshit.

 

[Kyle Sun]

As was expected.

 

[TaiShang]

Global Times has found the culprit: Vietnam’s rapid industrialization.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1092789.shtml

I believe the increasing trade volume are good for both countries. But as the report says, the surplus may possibly be caused by the volume of import and re-export from China to Europe of Vietnamese goods, including clothing and electronics, thanks to better rail link, rather than a real deficit of China.

Very good news, and a natural outcome of China becoming world's largest consumption economy with high-value exports and Vietnam is just beginning its own explosive East Asian economic miracle stage.

The more trade between historical neighbors, the better. After all, geography and geopolitics almost tie both sides inseparably together.

 

[zeronet]

Very good news, and a natural outcome of China becoming world's largest consumption economy with high-value exports and Vietnam is just beginning its own explosive East Asian economic miracle stage.

The more trade between historical neighbors, the better. After all, geography and geopolitics almost tie both sides inseparably together.

i would say it is hard to repeat old eastern asia model to grow economy any more. it is just too late. The time of protectionism is coming. For china herself its also very hard to keep $300billion trade surplus toward the US in the coming years. For vietnam's case, they are extremely dependent on international trading as indicated by their 2:1 of the im/export trading VS GDP ratio, while in China this ratio is 0.3:1. That means vietnam is much more vulnerable to the up and down of global markets.
Another issue is that all eastern asian economies grew with huge trading surplus in the past and accumulated tremendous amount of US dollar reserve, with this money they developed their Own tech/industry, this is how eastern asian growth model works. For Vietnam, they hardly have any surplus so far even though their trading volume is huge compared to their GDP, they are not there yet. And i don't think they can easily eliminate the trade imbalance with China. first two month of a year is not long enough to observe

 

[dy1022]

i would say it is hard to repeat old eastern asia model to grow economy any more. it is just too late. The time of protectionism is coming. For china herself its also very hard to keep $300billion trade surplus toward the US in the coming years. For vietnam's case, they are extremely dependent on international trading as indicated by their 2:1 of the im/export trading VS GDP ratio, while in China this ratio is 0.3:1. That means vietnam is much more vulnerable to the up and down of global markets.
Another issue is that all eastern asian economies grew with huge trading surplus in the past and accumulated tremendous amount of US dollar reserve, with this money they developed their Own tech/industry, this is how eastern asian growth model works. For Vietnam, they hardly have any surplus so far even though their trading volume is huge compared to their GDP, they are not there yet. And i don't think they can easily eliminate the trade imbalance with China. first two month of a year is not long enough to observe

Well said,can't agree more!

 

[Mista]

i would say it is hard to repeat old eastern asia model to grow economy any more. it is just too late. The time of protectionism is coming. For china herself its also very hard to keep $300billion trade surplus toward the US in the coming years. For vietnam's case, they are extremely dependent on international trading as indicated by their 2:1 of the im/export trading VS GDP ratio, while in China this ratio is 0.3:1. That means vietnam is much more vulnerable to the up and down of global markets.
Another issue is that all eastern asian economies grew with huge trading surplus in the past and accumulated tremendous amount of US dollar reserve, with this money they developed their Own tech/industry, this is how eastern asian growth model works. For Vietnam, they hardly have any surplus so far even though their trading volume is huge compared to their GDP, they are not there yet. And i don't think they can easily eliminate the trade imbalance with China. first two month of a year is not long enough to observe

Agreed. But I would say it's getting more difficult to emulate East Asia growth model not only because of protectionism, but mainly because of technology. Low-skilled labor has been losing leverage to enployers due to the advent of digital age and automation. This means that low-skilled labor isn't as critical as before and manufacturing industries can undercut them.

In a sweltering factory in southern India, Royal Enfieldmotorcycles are being painted and lacquered by giant robotic arms that move at twice the maximum speed of a human limb, day in, day out, never making a mistake.

Only a few workers are still needed on the paint line at Royal Enfield Motors Ltd.’s plant in Oragadam, doing touch-ups on the iconic two-wheelers coveted for their classic design. Four robots can do the work of 15 human painters toiling across three shifts.


India’s largely uneducated labor force and broken educational system aren’t ready for the more complex jobs that workers need when their low-skilled roles are taken over by machines.Meanwhile, nations employing robots more quickly, such as China, are becoming even more competitive.

“The need for unskilled labor is beginning to diminish,”Akhilesh Tilotia, head of thematic research at Kotak Institutional Equities in Mumbai and author of a book on India’s demographic impact.

Its older plant further north has also recently added four welding robots, which do in 20 seconds what takes two minutes for a human.

It’s also not clear if factories planned today will create the number and type of jobs that Modi is expecting.

“If you build a factory today assuming that it will create 100 jobs, in the course of 10 years as new technologies are adopted, it may create only 10 or 20 percent of the jobs you expected,” said Makoto Yokoyama, the head of Mitsubishi Electric Corp.’s factory automation division in India, who has witnessed Japan’s car plants employ fewer and fewer workers.

Tharman Shanmugaratnam, chairman of the International Monetary Fund’s policy advisory committee until March and Singapore’s finance minister, gives India -- and rivals such as Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia -- a fast-closing window to catch up with rich countries or miss the boat.

“Time is not on India’s side,” he told Indian policymakers at a government conference in December. “I give 10 years for labor-intensive manufacturing to survive in its present form before machines take over.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...on-undercuts-modi-s-quest-to-put-poor-to-work

Nine robots now do the job of 140 full-time workers. Robotic arms pick up sinks from a pile, buff them until they gleam and then deposit them on a self-driving trolley that takes them to a computer-linked camera for a final quality check.

The company, which exports 1,500 sinks a day, spent more than $3m on the robots. “These machines are cheaper, more precise and more reliable than people,” says Chen. “I’ve never had a whole batch ruined by robots. I look forward to replacing more humans in future,” he adds, with a wry smile.

China’s technological transformation still has far to go — the country has just 36 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers, compared with 292 in Germany, 314 in Japan and 478 in South Korea. But it is already changing the face of the global manufacturing industry. In the process, it is raising broader questions: can emerging economies still hope to follow the traditional route to prosperity that the developed world has relied upon since Britain’s industrial revolution in the 18th century? Or will robots assume many of the jobs that once pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty?

But the benefits of the robot revolution will not be shared equally across the world. Developing countries from India to Indonesia and Egypt to Ethiopia have long hoped to follow the example of China, as well as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan before them: stimulating job creation and economic growth by moving agricultural workers into low-cost factories to make goods for export. Yet the rise of automation means that industrialisation is likely to generate significantly fewer jobs for the next generation of emerging economies. “Today’s low-income countries will not have the same possibility of achieving rapid growth by shifting workers from farms to higher-paying factory jobs,” researchers from the US investment bank Citi and the University of Oxford concluded in a recent report, The Future Is Not What It Used to Be, on the impact of technological change.

They argue that China’s rising labour costs are a “silver lining” for the country because they are driving technological advancement, in much the same way that an increase in wages in 18th-century Britain provided impetus to the world’s first industrial revolution. At the same time, according to Johanna Chua, an economist at Citi in Hong Kong, industrial laggards in parts of Asia and Africa face a “race against the machines” as they struggle to create sufficient manufacturing jobs before they are wiped out by the gathering robot army in China and beyond.

Tom Lembong, Indonesia’s 45-year-old trade minister, and a leading voice for liberalisation and reform within the government of Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, is aware of the risks. “Many people don’t realise we’re seeing a quantum leap in robotics,” he says. “It’s a huge concern and we need to acknowledge the looming threat of this new industrial revolution. But as a political and business elite, we’re still stuck on debates about industrialisation that were settled in the 20th and even 19th centuries.”

Countries such as Indonesia are already suffering from something that the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has dubbed “premature de-industrialisation”. This describes a trend where emerging economies see their manufacturing sector begin to shrink long before the countries have reached income levels comparable to the developed world. Despite rapid economic growth over the past 15 years, Indonesia saw its manufacturing industry’s share of the economy peak in 2002. Analysts believe this is partly because of a failure to invest in infrastructure, and the country’s uncompetitive trade and investment policy, and partly due to globalisation.

Rodrik believes the country will never be able to grow at the kind of rapid rate experienced by China or South Korea. “Traditionally, manufacturing required very few skills and employed a lot of people,” he says. “Because of automation, the skills required have increased significantly and many fewer people are employed to run factories. What do you do with these extra workers? They won’t turn into IT entrepreneurs or entertainers; and, if they become restaurant workers, they will be paid much less than in a factory.”

Five factories a year have left the industrial park on the Indonesian island of Batam © Muhammad Fadli
The spread of robots makes it much harder for developing countries to get on the “escalator” of economic growth, he argues. That is bad news for the estimated two million young people who enter the workforce every year in Indonesia, a nation of 255 million, where 40 per cent live on $3 a day or less. Mahami Jaya Lumbanraja, a 22-year-old job-seeker on the Indonesian industrial island of Batam, is feeling the effects of the premature de-industrialisation phenomenon. For seven months he has been looking for a factory job in Batam, which sits just 20 miles from prosperous Singapore, but he has had no luck. Wearing faded jeans, a grey hoodie and an endearing smile, Lumbanraja says that although he has one year of experience working for Shimano, the Japanese manufacturer of bicycle gears and fishing tackle, he is not experienced enough to secure anything more than an entry-level position, and that there are many more job hunters than openings. “I can survive on the little money I get from busking and helping friends with construction work but I must get a proper factory job to save enough money so I can set up my own small shop later,” he says. Wages in Batam — around $230 per month — are double what Lumbanraja could earn in his home city of Medan, on the island of Sumatra. So he feels he must stay until he finds work.

Boston Consulting Group forecasts that the percentage of tasks handled by advanced robots will rise from 8 per cent today to 26 per cent by the end of the decade, driven by China, Germany, Japan, South Korea and the US, which together will account for 80 per cent of robot purchases. Sirkin at BCG says that the rapid expansion of automation could be compared to the difference between the “human learning curve” and Moore’s Law, which posited that computing power could double every 18 months to two years. “Even if you’re very good, humans can only double their productivity at best every 10 years,” he says. In contrast, researchers can push robots to double their productivity every four years, he estimates. “Compounded over time, that makes a big difference.”

As China and other industrial leaders build more and better robots, the tasks they can take on will expand. Butchery, for example, was long considered the sort of skill that machines would struggle to develop, because of the need for careful hand-eye co-ordination and the manipulation of non-uniform slabs of meat. But Sirkin has watched robots cut the fat off meat much more efficiently than humans, thanks to the use of cheaper and more responsive sensors. “It’s becoming economically feasible to use machines to do this because you save another 3 or 4 per cent of the meat — and that’s worth a lot on a production line, where you can move quickly.

“There are things that humans can do better than robots,” he adds. “But they are getting less and less.”

https://www.ft.com/content/1dbd8c60-0cc6-11e6-ad80-67655613c2d6

 

[Kiss_of_the_Dragon]

I think you are one of the most reasonsable people here, not the ones that are keen to destroy Vietnam.

Because if we are destroyed, the livelihood of Chinese living in VN will be destroyed too. That is bad, I believe.

Chinese lanterns festival in Cho Lon

View attachment 458973
View attachment 458974 View attachment 458975

is that a bargain? if the livehood of Chinese living in VN is destroyed, you will lost the "Chinese connection" to sell Vietnamese product into Chinese REALM , ask yourself why we Chinese want to buy Vietnamese fish sauce when we can buy from Thailand? if not because of Hoa merchants, we will simply ignore Vietnam, what ever Vietnam products can be found in Cambodia, Laos or Thailand.

And it's hilarious to claim that we're only one celebrate Lantern festival in Vietnam, you guys also enjoy too. maybe of your millennium nostalgia of China.

 

[TaiShang]

i would say it is hard to repeat old eastern asia model to grow economy any more. it is just too late. The time of protectionism is coming. For china herself its also very hard to keep $300billion trade surplus toward the US in the coming years. For vietnam's case, they are extremely dependent on international trading as indicated by their 2:1 of the im/export trading VS GDP ratio, while in China this ratio is 0.3:1. That means vietnam is much more vulnerable to the up and down of global markets.
Another issue is that all eastern asian economies grew with huge trading surplus in the past and accumulated tremendous amount of US dollar reserve, with this money they developed their Own tech/industry, this is how eastern asian growth model works. For Vietnam, they hardly have any surplus so far even though their trading volume is huge compared to their GDP, they are not there yet. And i don't think they can easily eliminate the trade imbalance with China. first two month of a year is not long enough to observe

I agree that it is becoming quite difficult to repeat East Asian miracle, yet, if there is going to be a success story (albeit not in the same scale as Japan, Korea or China have achieved), it will come somewhere nearby China.

It is for sure that SP12 won't be one of them, so, there remains SEA countries, especially those more effected by Confucian culture.

Vietnam happens to be a good candidate. It also depends much on geopolitics and Vietnam's decisions. If they, like SP12 did alienate and make a monster out of the world's largest producing and one of the consumption nations next door, then, their fate will remain tied to Trump's (and those who will follow him like Oprah or Ivanka) shenanigans.

 

[Dungeness]

With a solid primary and secondary education system, Vietnam will become an industrialized country much faster than other developing countries.

 

[terranMarine]

It's impossible for Vietnam to replicate what China has achieved. And no it's not gonna be the next Japan nor South Korea either. The general theory of Chinese labor getting more expensive thus manufacturing will be all shipping to cheaper countries like Vietnam just not gonna happen. We are living in a different age now where 3d printing, robotics are becoming more important. China isn't called the world factory for nothing, Vietnam nor India isn't gonna be the next manufacturing giant. India has missed the boat completely decades ago, no turning back. Right now China is transitioning to a new phase where we would rely more on domestic consumption rather depending on export. US trade protectionism is hammering its allies in the aluminum and steel export whereas China hardly feeling any impact at all. Double digit growth is also a thing of the past, so if countries like India and Vietnam were pinning their hope on the cheap labor and huge growth rate oooops.

China is really blessed = huge workforce, early investments flooding in from HK, JP. Tech transfer from Taiwan the chip juggernaut. HK the gateway and financial center of Asia all contributed to the rapid development. Not only are we US biggest creditor we have amassed > $3 Trn of reserves. Grown huge tech companies holding many patents.

It's gonna be fun watching India and Vietnam competing with each other for economic growth. Perhaps Vietnam could surpass India

 

[faithfulguy]

It's impossible for Vietnam to replicate what China has achieved. And no it's not gonna be the next Japan nor South Korea either. The general theory of Chinese labor getting more expensive thus manufacturing will be all shipping to cheaper countries like Vietnam just not gonna happen. We are living in a different age now where 3d printing, robotics are becoming more important. China isn't called the world factory for nothing, Vietnam nor India isn't gonna be the next manufacturing giant. India has missed the boat completely decades ago, no turning back. Right now China is transitioning to a new phase where we would rely more on domestic consumption rather depending on export. US trade protectionism is hammering its allies in the aluminum and steel export whereas China hardly feeling any impact at all. Double digit growth is also a thing of the past, so if countries like India and Vietnam were pinning their hope on the cheap labor and huge growth rate oooops.

China is really blessed = huge workforce, early investments flooding in from HK, JP. Tech transfer from Taiwan the chip juggernaut. HK the gateway and financial center of Asia all contributed to the rapid development. Not only are we US biggest creditor we have amassed > $3 Trn of reserves. Grown huge tech companies holding many patents.

It's gonna be fun watching India and Vietnam competing with each other for economic growth. Perhaps Vietnam could surpass India

I do see Vietnam growing. They are close to China and share a similar culture as East Asia. Supa Powa already believe it’s a Supa Powa so why would they need to improve. They made a video To brag. These guys are hopeless.

 

[Viet]

Excellent job btw. Hope Vietnam march continues as fast as possible.

Yes we march on. VN economy grows 7.5 percent in the first quarter. The highest since years. Factories run with full capacity. More factories are under construction, and many more to come.

Samsung seeks 8,000 more workers.

The Koreans accelerate moving factories to Vietnam.

There are many challenges ahead though.

 

[Unknown-V]

$200 billions economy who act like $2 trillions economy, that's Vietnamese on this forum.

 

[patman]

More Indian bullshit.

Chinese butthurt over facts

http://adage.com/article/global-news/chinese-consumers-trust-products-made-china/241165/

What you know about Chinese? most US, Japan and Korea products are made in China, so by buying their product will help our production but it's true to say that Most Indians don't buy most of Indian products, they import from China because Indian can't make by themself

Yawn

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/...eign-cars.html?referer=https://www.google.fr/