Samsung is ‘reluctant’ to build a semiconductor chip factory in Vietnam, Nikkei Asia is reporting. The publication goes on to detail Vietnam’s falling exports of smartphones and outlines some of the arrangements Samsung has with the Vietnamese authorities in order to ensure their operations run smoothly.
Some context: Vietnam has been trying to tap in on a global trend toward decentralising chip production on the back of recent shortages in a bid to shift its economy toward high-tech manufacturing. But that shift has proven elusive. Vietnam is usually utilised as an assembly point with the high-tech parts it puts together imported from South Korea or China. In this context moving from simple assembly to complex semiconductor chip manufacturing appears to be too big of a leap. Note that Samsung did announce a new chip factory earlier this year but in Japan not Vietnam.
See also: Vietnam’s Semiconductor Manufacturing Ambitions: Unpacked