President Joe Biden is back in Washington today, following a trip to the Indo-Pacific —including a stop in Vietnam.
While the government delegation has moved on, the level of business relations between the two countries continues to deepen.
When the United States established official relations with Vietnam two decades after the fall of Saigon, business moved faster than diplomacy.
Coca-Cola was already widely available on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City while Vietnam was still under U.S. trade sanctions.
When Coke opened a bottling plant outside Hanoi in 1995, it was the first American factory to operate in the country since the Vietnam War.
Later that year, Nike followed with five contract factories. Today, Nike has more than 150 contract factories in Vietnam.
And in those intervening years, US-Vietnamese business ties have moved up the technology chain.
Intel has a $1.5 billion factory in the southern part of the country that assembles and tests semiconductors.
Amkor Technology does similar work and is planning a large assembly plant outside Hanoi.
Some investment also moves the other way. Vietnam’s electric vehicle maker VinFast is building a factory in North Carolina.
Trade between the two countries also swelled in recent years. Three years ago, Vietnam cracked the top ten list of United States’ trading partners — and in July, Census Department figures show it moved up to number seven.
