Vietnam investing, over coffee
If you had a coffee this morning, there's a reasonable chance the beans came from Vietnam. It's the second-largest coffee producer in the world after Brazil, and comfortably the biggest grower of robusta. It's one of those facts that sits just outside what most of us know about a country of a hundred million people.
Fifty years on from the end of the war, Vietnam has gone from one of the poorest countries on earth to a middle-income economy in a single generation. Income per head was under US$700 as recently as 1986. It's now around US$4,500 and climbing. The overwhelming majority of Vietnamese alive today were born after 1975, and it shows: it's a young, fast, restless country that has gone from rationing to being one of the places where the world's electronics actually get made. Vietnam is now a serious manufacturing base for global electronics. Despite this, very little Australian capital is currently allocated there.
On 21 September, Vietnam formally joins the FTSE Emerging Markets index, moving up from frontier status for the first time. It is a technical event with practical consequences: index inclusion draws passive capital, deepens liquidity, and changes which investors are permitted to look at a market at all.
Our guest is Nga Nguyen, who is in Sydney from Ho Chi Minh City. Nga has spent close to twenty years in Vietnamese markets, studied in the United States as a Fulbright scholar, and now runs advisory at an investment firm in Vietnam. She'll talk about what actually changed and why, what daily life looks like now, what young Vietnamese women are doing with their careers and their money, and where she thinks it all goes next.
The session will cover
How Vietnam moved from post-war reconstruction to middle income in a single generation, and what actually drove it
What the FTSE reclassification changes in practice, and what it does not
How the market functions day to day: who owns what, what is investable, where the constraints sit
The demographic and social picture behind the growth figures
The format is a briefing and discussion over morning tea, with plenty of time for questions.