2023-06-29 03:00:10
Loading VinFast electric cars bound for the United States, at the port of Haiphong, Vietnam, November 25, 2022. NGUYEN HA MINH / REUTERS
“I’m signing a new tenant, and I’m yours. » The Belgian Bruno Jaspaert, general manager of Deep C, the largest industrial zone in the Haiphong region (Vietnam), has a string of contracts. Its tenants are new factories – that day, at the end of March, Chinese battery manufacturers. Arriving in 1997 with its expertise in the polders, this company park manager has doubled its turnover in the past two years.
As far as the eye can see, excavators are shaping the embankments of future artificial islands. More than 150 companies, mostly foreign, have settled on 30 square kilometers built on the sea. The Japanese Bridgestone, which arrived in 2011, manufactures all its winter tires there. Chinese Flat, glass for solar panels. The Italian Piaggio, its Vespas for all of Asia. And in a contiguous economic zone, VinFast, a pioneer of Vietnamese automobiles, its electric cars.
Haiphong is the largest port in northeast Vietnam – Hanoi is 120 kilometers away. The French had founded it in 1874 and then connected it at the beginning of the 20th century by a railway to Kunming, in Chinese Yunnan, with the illusory hope of opening up access to the Middle Kingdom. Today, a new deep-water port, also built on the water in the extension of the polders, has put the former “Venice of Tonkin” on the map of global value-added chains between Asia and the rest of the world.
Growth built on foreign investment
Its first two container terminals took just four years to reach saturation, two others are under construction. Failing to renovate the train line that connects Haiphong to Hanoi, and continues to China, the Vietnamese authorities have connected it, by a motorway just opened, to Shenzhen, the economic crossroads of southern China, now twelve hours by truck.
Haiphong and its old colonial buildings, still on the threshold of the urban transformation experienced by Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the economic capital of the South, are the symbol of this Vietnamese economy in full mutation. Even more than China, communist Vietnam, which joined the World Trade Organization in 2007, has built its spectacular growth (6% since 2006) on foreign investment, subject to fewer restrictions than in China. Thus, between 65% and 70% of its exports come from companies with foreign capital.
Vietnam plays the globalization card with such enthusiasm that it has fifteen free trade treaties to its credit, including one with the European Union. It is the only country in Southeast Asia, with Singapore, to take advantage of it. Hanoi is a member of China’s “New Silk Roads”, the CPTPP Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement supported by Japan, and the China Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.
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