Viet's note · Memos

Vietnam taps Samsung hub and Ha Long Bay province as growth zones

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:58:00 GMT

In Vietnam’s highly centralized system, the new status is expected to give the two localities a more direct channel to Hanoi, potentially smoothing decisions on infrastructure and investment.
Bac Ninh was Vietnam’s biggest exporting locality in 2025, with shipments of about $93 billion, accounting for nearly one-fifth of Vietnam’s exports, largely driven by electronics and other manufactured goods.
The province was also the country’s second-largest FDI recipient last year, attracting nearly $19 b i l l i o n i n d o m e s t i c a n d f o r e i g n i n v e s t m e n t, a c c o r d i n g t o p r o v i n c i a l d a t a . A s o f J u n e, c u m u l a t i v e F D I s t o o d a t a b o u t$ 41 billion.
Quang Ninh, meanwhile, combines tourism, trade and a rapidly expanding manufacturing base. The province recorded Vietnam’s fastest economic growth last year at 11.9%, underscoring its emergence as one of the country’s most dynamic economies.
Vietnam’s move to elevate Bac Ninh and Quang Ninh has parallels with China, which offers both a model and a warning, said Ascentium’s Forster.
Shenzhen and Chongqing show how administrative reforms, industrial policy and government backing can help accelerate growth when backed by strong economic fundamentals. Meanwhile, Tianjin offers the opposite lesson, where debt-fueled development without a strong industrial base led to weak growth and empty skyscrapers.
“Bac Ninh and Quang Ninh look much more like the Chongqing model than the Tianjin one,” Forster said. “The fundamentals are real, the upgrade formalizes and accelerates rather than invents. I’d watch the Gia Binh airport development in Bac Ninh specifically as the next big catalyst.”
Quang Ninh had the country’s fifth-highest average income last year, at about 6.9 million dong ($263) a month, according to data from the National Statistics Office.
Bac Ninh’s economy grew 10.27% last year, and its average income stood at around 6 million a month, roughly the national average.

asia.nikkei.com

Exclusive: Google plans to stop making Pixel products in China in 2027

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:46:00 GMT

Google has been aggressively expanding capacity in Vietnam and India to lower its dependency on China in recent years, though a significant portion of its production remains in the country. The successful development and production of high-end Pixel phones in Vietnam this year – which is more complicated than smartwatches and earbuds – gave Google the confidence to proceed with the 2027 timeline for moving all Pixel production out of China, sources with direct knowledge of the matter said.
If realized, the move would make Google the second global brand after Samsung to decouple its smartphone production from China.
“Compared with Apple, Google has no burden [to leave China] as it does not sell Pixel phones in the Chinese market,” said one of the people with knowledge of the plan. “The progress in Vietnam is smooth, as Samsung has built a smartphone supply chain ecosystem there that Google could also access.”

asia.nikkei.com

Chip boom pushes Vietnam, Philippines closer to 'high-income' status

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:24:00 GMT

The growth of the semiconductor industry in Southeast Asia has reconfigured economic development in the region, putting Vietnam and the Philippines on course toward the sought-after status of “high-income countries.”
Vietnam has lifted its national income through export-led economic growth. It has concluded trade agreements with countries and regions around the world, drawn foreign investment, and established manufacturing hubs for electronic components and electrical equipment.
In addition to back-end chipmaking processes requiring a large workforce, Vietnam looks to engage in front-end processes, which involve circuit formation. Chip design and development will also be part of the effort.
If Vietnam continues to grow at the same pace as its average over the past decade, then its per-capita GNI will surpass Thailand’s in 2037, and Vietnam will become a high-income country around 2040, according to an estimate in Thai news outlet The Nation.
The Philippines is also overhauling its semiconductor industry, which centers on back-end processes. In April, it joined the U.S.-led Pax Silica initiative, which aims to build an AI chip supply chain among friendly countries. Semiconductors and other electronic products account for more than 50% of the country’s goods exports by value.

asia.nikkei.com

Travel agents are in demand—especially for luxury trips

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:33:00 GMT

Travel agents often go above and beyond for their clients. That is in part why people still use them in an age of AI-tineraries. In Britain about a third of travellers booked their holidays through a human specialist last year, reckons ABTA, a British trade association. Across the pond more than 310,000 agents are members of the American Society of Travel Advisers, another trade group, up from 190,000 in 2024. LinkedIn recently ranked the job one of the fastest-growing in America (though the Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons it will grow more slowly than average in the period until 2034).
People turn to travel advisers for their “taste and judgment” in curating trips, says Evan Frank, co-founder of Fora, a luxury host agency. Seasoned advisers have superior knowledge of particular countries and a network of exclusive hotels. Some stick to a particular niche, booking trips for people who have food allergies or tourists who want to travel solo or with their pets.

www.economist.com

Violent Israeli settlers want to provoke a Palestinian uprising

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:09:00 GMT

Israeli settlers have planted vines in neat rows, erected fences festooned with flags and brought in herds of goats. They patrol the area with new Ranger utility vehicles and assault rifles given to them by the Israeli government.

Chart: The Economist

Their stated aim is to cause “friction” with adjacent Palestinian villages. That tends to lead to intervention by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), more often than not on the settlers’ side, followed by the expulsion of Palestinians and the expansion of outposts of Israeli settlements (see chart 1).

Chart: The Economist

The tactic, common in the West Bank, often succeeds at forcing Palestinian villagers to flee their homes, allowing the settlers to take over the surrounding land. This time was different for several reasons. The residents of Qusra, who had previously experienced similar attacks, were quick to publicise the latest one online and attract international attention. One of the besieged homes is owned by an American citizen. Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador, who usually supports the settlers, posted on social media that it was his embassy’s “request to remove the Israeli terrorists”.
Yet the incident is also part of a fresh escalation over the past month, as settlers have tried to grab as much land as they can before the election in October, which might return a government less supportive of their cause.
On July 24th a group of armed settlers arrived in the village of Tel on what they claimed was a “hike.” Four Palestinians and two Israelis ended up killed. In response the IDF deployed more troops and imposed closures on Palestinian towns, including Nablus, one of the largest cities in the West Bank.

www.economist.com

Far-right Israeli minister advocates killing ‘30 to 40’ Gazans each night

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:03:00 GMT

Israel should be killing “30 to 40” people each night in Gaza and should build Jewish settlements in the Palestinian enclave, the country’s far-right national security minister has said in an interview.
Ben-Gvir also called for the re-establishment of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territory, saying that he envisaged “all Gaza” belonging to Israel, and reiterating his previous calls for Palestinians to “emigrate”.
During Hamas’s October 7 attack, militants killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and took more than 250 hostages to Gaza where they were kept in harsh conditions, with many saying they suffered abuse in captivity.
Israel responded with a ferocious offensive in Gaza, which has killed more than 73,000 people, according to Palestinian officials, and caused a humanitarian catastrophe in the enclave. This includes 1,200 people killed since a ceasefire took effect last October.
Ben-Gvir’s statements are the latest in a string of inflammatory rhetoric from the far-right minister, who oversees the Israeli police and prison system.

www.ft.com

The world’s biggest fast-food chain is moving into pubs

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:14:00 GMT

Even in the most remote corner of China a frothy Fulujia beer is waiting for you. The company, whose name translates as “Lucky Deer”, has opened more than 3,200 mini-pubs across the country since 2021, making it the world’s largest bar chain. More impressive than its scale are its prices. A pint is poured for as little as 5.9 yuan ($0.87), whether it is served in a big city or a border town.
Fulujia premises are small but uniform micro-watering holes that have 20 beers on draft and a bijou seating area. They often sell bar snacks such as fried pork and edamame beans. When asked why prices are so low, the proprietor of a recently opened Fulujia in Lushui, a town in the deep south-west, says it is because the company is owned by Mixue Bingcheng, a tea and cold-drinks mega-chain that has around 60,000 outlets worldwide. Last year it overtook McDonald’s, the American burger giant, to become the world’s largest fast-food operator by number of locations.
The secret to Mixue’s success is its mastery of supply chains. It is often described as a logistics company rather than a fast-food chain. The efficiency with which Mixue has been able to move supplies has kept costs for consumers remarkably low—its marquee drink is a four-yuan lemonade. Fulujia uses the same logistics networks to ship its beer from Henan province, where both Mixue and Fulujia are based, to its franchisees, who do not pay transport costs, even when they are as far away as Lushui, more than 2,000km from the brewery.
Nearly two-thirds of its 3,200 bars have been launched since Mixue bought its stake late last year.

www.economist.com

China is now the world’s great oil power

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Between February and June, China slashed its crude imports by half, or 5.5m b/d—enough, experts reckon, to have shaved $30 or more off Brent, the global benchmark. That is more than half of the worldwide decline during the covid-19 lockdowns, when global demand collapsed by 9m b/d. And in contrast to the pandemic, when the world economy slid into recession, China’s GDP has chugged along just fine.
This ability to turn oil demand on and off, ostensibly at low economic cost, allows the world’s biggest oil importer to move prices just as the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies have long done through their control of half of global output.

Chart: The Economist

For four decades OPEC has striven to keep prices high using production quotas. Importers cannot conversely keep prices low by rationing demand, because buyers are much more fragmented than sellers and because domestic energy demand is the result of decisions by countless agents. Huge, statist China is the exception. And unlike OPEC+, whose decisions require agreement among 21 countries, its central planners can act unilaterally on the orders of one man, President Xi Jinping.
China moves petroleum markets using three main levers. The first is its national petroleum stocks. In the 12 months to early 2026, as the spectre of a “superglut” depressed crude prices, China snapped up 200m barrels on the cheap, topping up already ample reserves of 1bn barrels. Traders reckon Chinese purchases may have added $10-20 to the global price of a barrel before the Iran war broke out. Of the 11.6m b/d China imported in February, up to 1m b/d were excess purchases it could subsequently forgo by stockpiling less.

Chart: The Economist

Once its last pre-war Gulf cargoes had arrived in late April, China began drawing down these brimming reserves. By July its inventories had fallen by 70m barrels, according to Vortexa, a data firm, not counting draws from floating storage and hidden caves. Add these in, and China tapped 150m barrels in those three months, or some 1.5m b/d.
Commercial stocks—held by the profit-seeking storage arms of big oil firms—rather than strategic reserves accounted for most of this. Refiners must usually replace what they draw within a month, notes Tom Reed of Argus Media, a price-reporting agency. But since those firms are state-owned, and the state can requisition commercial stock, an exemption was presumably made.

Chart: The Economist

Chinese central planners’ second lever is export controls. As the world’s second-largest oil refiner, China is usually a big fuel supplier to its Asian neighbours. In March, however, the government ordered domestic refiners to stop signing new export contracts and unwind many of those already agreed. Between February and April, China’s exports of refined products fell by nearly half to 430,000 b/d. This included 180,000 b/d of highly refined jet fuel, which saved Chinese refineries 1.2m-1.8m b/d of crude.
The Chinese government also pulled a third lever—curbing domestic demand. In June Chinese refineries processed 2.7m fewer b/d of crude than a year earlier. Production of petrol fell by 14%; output of diesel and jet fuel both shrunk by 21%.

Chart: The Economist

A look under the bonnet confirms a sharp drop in Chinese motor-fuel use. As the authorities allowed fuel prices to rise, many city dwellers have stopped driving to work, opting instead for the metro, bicycles or taxis (many of which are battery-powered). During a week-long national holiday in May, electric-vehicle charging along motorways rose by nearly 55% compared with the year before. Trains are picking up the slack from domestic flights, the number of which has been slashed. Local authorities have postponed infrastructure works, saving on diesel. Ciarán Healy of the International Energy Agency reckons China burnt 10% less petrol and kerosene in the war’s first couple of months than in the same period a year earlier.
China’s petrochemical industry, the world’s biggest, is also adapting to the straitened circumstances. Last year it turned millions of barrels per day of naphtha and LPG, a lot from the Gulf, into polymers—materials ranging from PVC and synthetic rubber to nylon and polyester—which Chinese factories use by the tonne. In the absence of Gulf-sourced feedstocks, and in the presence of a government edict to prioritise fuel over feedstocks, petrochemicals firms have instead come up with ways to make some polymers using coal and ethane, a gaseous byproduct of petroleum refining.
Years of state-backed investment in renewables and green transport has made the energy system more flexible. Years of “involution”, where fierce competition has led to overcapacity in industries including petrochemicals, has left China with large unsold inventories of polymers and the stuff these go into.
Such buffers explain why producer prices are not spiking and consumer prices remain under control.

www.economist.com

China has wrested control of oil markets from OPEC

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 09:50:00 GMT

THE GREAT economic surprise of the Iran war has been that oil prices have stayed relatively contained even with the Strait of Hormuz mostly shut. Five months into the war Brent crude remains about $40 b e l o w t h e$ 126 per barrel intraday high it hit on April 30th; for a while there was even a “mini-glut” of crude oil. As a result motorists and oil importers have not yet faced a severe crunch.
When Iran started pointing its drones and missiles at tankers crossing the strait, 14m barrels per day (b/d) of crude oil—roughly one-fifth of world output—risked being trapped in the Gulf. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) soon redirected about 5m b/d via pipelines. Strategic-stock releases by rich countries, including America and Japan, covered another chunk. But the biggest shock absorber has been a near-halving of China’s crude-oil imports, to 5.5m b/d. Curtailing China’s imports has been a feat of state engineering, achieved by releasing stocks, restricting exports and managing demand.
China’s oil strategy, by contrast, has proved helpful this year. Its accumulation of vast stocks when prices were low will have imposed a small cost on the global economy at the time. But dampening price spikes is correspondingly beneficial. If China ends up smoothing peaks and troughs in prices, it could make investments in new sources of supply easier to plan. Trying to buy low and sell high can go wrong, as any speculator knows. Thankfully it is China that bears that risk, and the costs of storage.
Yet over time the supply of oil may contract faster than demand, and China’s role in influencing the latter could shrink. Every two years, as oilfields deplete, the world loses one Saudi Arabia’s worth of crude supply. At a global level, investment is inadequate to replace those barrels beyond 2030.

www.economist.com

Why standing at your desk may be little better than sitting

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 08:48:00 GMT

PROLONGED SITTING rightly has a bad rap. A review in 2012 concluded that the most sedentary were more than twice as likely as the least to have or develop diabetes, and also faced a much higher risk of premature death. Another, in 2015, found that sitting for long stretches was associated with “deleterious health outcomes regardless of physical activity”. Three years after that an analysis of news articles in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found hundreds of pieces that referred to claims likening sitting to smoking.
An analysis in 2018 found standing at a desk burned just nine more calories per hour than sitting. Nor are the cardiovascular gains impressive.
A review in 2020 pooled nine trials involving 877 people. Participants stood about 1.3 hours more a day and were followed for roughly four months. Body fat and blood-sugar control improved slightly, but blood pressure, insulin, cholesterol and triglycerides did not. The study did not, however, look at blood flow and the activation of postural muscles, both factors which might contribute to the benefits of standing over sitting.
standing can have downsides. A study in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 2024 crunched data on 83,013 adults in Britain followed for an average of nearly seven years. Those who stood for more than two hours a day had a higher risk of varicose veins and venous ulcers, perhaps because of pooling of blood in the legs.
What matters far more is movement. A study of nearly 482,000 Taiwanese adults in 2024 found that just 15–30 minutes of extra daily exercise could erase most of the excess mortality risk associated with sitting at work.
20 adults perform short reading and typing tasks on an ordinary chair, an exercise ball and a seat mounted on top of an inflatable bladder. Energy expenditure on the ball was similar to normal sitting. But on the bladder, participants’ heart rates and calorie burn rose by 6–13% and 19–40% respectively. Writing in Ergonomics in 2019, the researchers attributed this to muscle contractions required to maintain balance.

www.economist.com

Japan faces record izakaya bankruptcies, signaling change of drink culture

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:37:00 GMT

Surging food and utility costs continue to squeeze margins for his izakaya Japanese-style pub, and profits have not recovered as quickly as customer traffic has since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Its signature dish is straw-seared bonito sourced from Tokyo’s Toyosu wholesale market. The fish is grilled and served with ginger and green onions. Nearly every customer orders it, Matsubara says.
But the wholesale price of bonito has risen three to four times over the past two to three years. “If we raise prices much further, people will stop ordering it,” he said.
According to Tokyo Shoko Research (TSR), 118 izakaya operators went bankrupt during the first half of 2026, the highest January-June total since comparable records began in 1989. More than 90% of the failed businesses employed fewer than 10 people. It also forecasts the total number of izakaya bankruptcies in 2026 could reach a record high.
Changing drinking habits are adding to the pressure. Kuranosuke’s Matsubara feels that corporate drinking parties have largely returned since the pandemic, but second and third rounds of drinks – once a staple of Japan’s after-work culture – are far less common, meaning less revenue during late-night hours.
According to Japanese research firm Fuji Keizai group, the market size of izakaya-style and robatayaki charcoal-grilled foods is expected to be 1.1 trillion yen in 2035, down 31% from 2019.
as inflation squeezes household budgets, diners are becoming more particular about where they spend their money.
For years, customers were drawn by low prices, locations near train stations and all-you-can-drink plans. Today, many seek something more distinctive: signature dishes, local sake, memorable service and unique atmospheres.
The cramped setting leaves little room for anonymity. Customers find themselves drawn into conversations with the owner and often with strangers seated nearby.

asia.nikkei.com

Why AI is a risk to Communist China

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:22:00 GMT

The common perception is that they are cheap and that even the best persistently lag behind America’s. In fact, the two countries’ AI models are converging. Innovative Chinese models are getting bigger and cleverer.
Although Chinese models are cheaper, American models are often better value. Artificial Analysis, an American firm, finds that for most trade-offs between cost and intelligence, an American model outperforms Chinese ones.
China’s open-weight models can run on anyone’s servers, meaning that compute is less of a problem than the headline numbers suggest.
China also has almost three times as much installed electricity-generating capacity as America, and its lead is growing.
as with other broad technologies such as electricity, adoption brings greater rewards than discovery.
China’s working-age population is due to shrink by 25% by 2050; for machines to replace people requires diffusion
So far, the use of AI has yet to show up in the economic statistics of either America or China. But change in some industries has already been sweeping. AI-assisted lorries will need 30% fewer drivers, going by one large firm’s experience, as crews slim from two drivers to one and from four to three. AI was used to generate 95% of the 128,000 wildly popular one- or two-minute-long microdramas released in the first quarter of 2026, replacing many actors and film crews.
China is also rapidly increasing the use of robots. In June leaders told local governments and state-owned enterprises to have 10,000 humanoid robots doing real work by the end of 2026. Morgan Stanley, a bank, expects humanoid sales in China to reach 446,000 by 2030, nine times this year’s total. Workers are being paid to train robots in huge warehouses by repeatedly folding clothes and sorting and stacking objects.
Although Chinese firms want to roll out AI fast, the government will be desperate to avoid instability.