VietNamNet Bridge - Intel chairman Craig Barrett, visited Vietnam last week and worked intensively with the education sector to promote stronger IT adoption across the education system. He talked with VIR in an exclusive interview. What should Vietnam do to sustain its development through the current downturn?
First and foremost you want to improve the education system. Secondly, to jump start economic development, there is always a tendency to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) to create jobs, to start to create a middle class. The third step is always about going beyond just attracting FDI, you need to start creating your own ideas, your own businesses, and your own capabilities.
If you look around the world, countries that make the transition from a relatively low level of economic structure to a higher level of economic structure, they always follow the same steps. So eventually you need to move from “made in Vietnam” to “created in Vietnam”. Taiwan, Singapore, Ireland have gone through this, Malaysia is going through this. It is a relatively structured set of steps that you have to take.
What are the most important areas that we should focus on?
There are three major areas. One is education. Everywhere I go education is the key issue. The economy is going to be competitive, per capita income will go up as the education level of the workforce increases. The second area is healthcare, integrating IT into healthcare and also the use of IT to deliver healthcare to rural environments.
The third issue is small and medium sized businesses, how to make them more competitive with the IT infrastructure. You should also focus heavily on investing in ideas, which is research and development (R&D). Currently, if you look at the percentage of the Vietnamese GDP that goes back to R&D, I think it is relatively small. R&D is the value creation of the next generation of products, services and companies.
Has your factory in Vietnam been affected by the economic downturn and are related suppliers following your lead into Vietnam as usual?
We plan to have the facility finished by the end of this year and start production early next year. It has not been materially impacted by the slowdown. For our long range manufacturing plans, usually we ignore recessions. New technologies, new products are our lifeblood. In terms of new manufacturing capacity and technology we typically never slowed down.
The only thing we tend to do in a recessional period is modulate our manufacturing capacity. As you saw we did that several months ago when we announced the closure of some factories and repositioning of others. The factory in Vietnam is key to our roadmap for the future so we are not slowing that down at all.
About related suppliers, a number of them have followed our lead into Vietnam, but that will occur more strongly after we get into production and as we ramp up our own workforce and output. The long-term target that both Intel and the Vietnamese government focus on is to create a local supplier base. The suppliers must have on-site resources when they put their facilities in place to give you full time support.
The PC market forecast for Asia Pacific, including Vietnam, is exceptionally low this year, how does it affect Intel and the semiconductor and computer industry?
Many of us in this industry take a long-term view of what’s going to happen. If you look at the IT and computer industry and the communication infrastructure, for the long term it continues to grow, but it does not grow in a linear fashion, it grows in a saw through fashion. So what we tend to do is invest in the long term, not for the instantaneous where we are going up or down.
That’s why the manufacturing investment continues on independent of short-term demands. If you look at our overall R&D investment, it continues because we know that we need new technologies, new products, new architecture and new manufacturing capabilities. All the things the Vietnamese government is doing for the education system to strongly embrace IT are opportunities to do the same sort of thing that Intel is doing during the recessional period, which is investing for the future.
Every time your have a recession there is also an opportunity to continue to invest and gain an advantage over the competition. The one business rule that we have observed is that market shares are won and lost during periods of transition of all kinds, and an economic recession is one of the transition periods.
Market shares are won and lost depending on whether you decide to invest through the recession or not. Those countries that choose to invest will probably come out in 2010 – 2011 stronger than others. Actually the South East Asia forecast is slightly positive growth this year, that’s pretty good compared to a lot of other areas. VietNamNet/VIR | 
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