Investors Seek Asian Options to Costly China

Foreign direct investment in China has grown by a third over the last three years. By contrast, foreign direct investment has more than doubled in this period in the Philippines, quintupled in India and soared more than eightfold in Vietnam.

Faster rates of increase in other Asian countries had partly reflected lower starting points. But investment is still growing quickly, and now it’s growing from high levels. For example, foreign investment in Vietnam reached nearly $18 billion last year.

A popular saying among Western investors is that Vietnam is the next China. Cambodia, with even lower wages attracting garment manufacturers, is called the next Vietnam.

But Vietnam has only 1/16th of China’s population and Cambodia has one-fifth of Vietnam’s. As foreign investors leap into each new country, they drive up the cost of workers and goods, a dynamic that makes it less likely that a shift in investment patterns will hold down inflation in American imports.

A recent survey by Grant Thornton, a global accounting and consulting firm, found that companies were more worried about attracting and retaining critical staff in Vietnam than anywhere else in the world. (China was a close second.)

“We trained them, we educated them and then they quit,” said Akira Akashi, the chairman of Nissan Techno, a division of Nissan that designs vehicles.

The company plans to expand to 1,400 engineers in Vietnam by 2010. Beginning engineers here still earn just $200 a month, less than half the salary in China and less than a tenth of American and Japanese salaries.

Even blue-collar labor is becoming harder to find. In addition to the size of the labor force, infrastructure is also likely to be a brake on how fast China plus one can expand. Most countries in Asia, including Vietnam, have not improved transportation links as quickly as China. Lengthy traffic jams slow down shipments and drive up costs.

Vietnam’s biggest selling point for many companies is its political stability. Like China, it has a nominally Communist one-party system that crushes dissent, keeps the military under tight control and changes government policies and leaders slowly.

“Communism means more stability,” Mr. Shu, the chief financial officer of Texhong, said, voicing a common view among Asian executives who make investment decisions. At least a few American executives agree, although they never say so on the record.

Democracies like those in Thailand and the Philippines have proved more vulnerable to military coups and instability. A military coup in Thailand in September 2006 was briefly followed by an attempt, never completed, to impose nationalistic legislation penalizing foreign companies.

“That sent the wrong signal that we would not welcome foreign investment — this has ruined the confidence of investors locally and internationally,” the finance minister Surapong Suebwonglee said in an interview in Bangkok.

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Yet, like China, Vietnam does not offer complete tranquillity either. For instance, workers are becoming more vocal and staging more strikes, despite a government ban on independent unions.

Nearly 20,000 workers walked out this spring at a Nike shoe factory run by a Taiwanese contractor. The workers went back to work only when given a 10 percent raise, to $55 a month, and a larger meal subsidy.

That restive pattern is also evident in India, which is expected to have more people than China within two decades.

But many companies are leery of poor roads and congested ports in India, as well as long sailing times for components that must be shipped from existing factories in China.

And even in India, demand for workers with industrial skills or the ability to speak English outstrips the supply — and their wages have been rising by 10 to 20 percent a year.

That has led to worries about India’s long-term competitiveness, even for those investing heavily there, like Ford Motor, which is planning to spend $500 million on factory expansion.

“I keep saying to our people, ‘How long will it be until we’re priced out of the market?’ ” said John Parker, Ford’s executive vice president for Asia, Pacific and Africa. “The impact of that some day is you’re no longer low-cost.”

Keith Bradsher reported in April from Vietnam and later from Bangkok, Beijing, Hong Kong, Manila and Guangzhou, China.

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times

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