As the end of the Vietnam War neared in 1975, Co Pham fled his South Vietnamese home for the U.S. Pham, then 30, was one of thousands of refugees who chose to begin their new lives in Orange County.
Today, a much older Pham leads a frenetic life, heading Westminster-based Bolsa Medical Group, a global trading company and an independent physicians association. But his unruffled exterior suggests little in the way of internal stress or turmoil. He interrupted a recent visit with a reporter to deliver a baby at a Fountain Valley obstetrics center and promptly returned to the interview without missing a beat.
Pham, chairman of the 250-member Vietnamese-American Chamber of Commerce in Westminster, wants to see his fellow Vietnamese-Americans develop closer ties with their homeland. He’s not without his critics in Little Saigon, where some see his efforts as tantamount to cozying up with the enemy. But Pham’s long-running efforts are starting to show results, albeit with limited success.
Pham led a trade mission of local officials and business people to Vietnam in December, on the heels of former President Clinton’s November visit to the Southeast Asian nation. The timing of the trade mission was no accident: “We wanted to take advantage of momentum created by the Clinton visit,” he said.
The trip included county Supervisor Charles Smith, bankers and businesspeople. The goal: to build business ties between Vietnam and OC and its large Vietnamese community.
“The Clinton mission approached Vietnam from a national level, which is great, because that’s where policy comes from,” said Douglas Martin, a global development director with Project Development International Inc., a Lake Forest consultant. “But the OC mission was more personal because of our large Vietnamese community and because we presented local companies ready to put things in place.”
The 18-person delegation started in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, and worked its way down south to Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s largest city and chief economic hub.
Visitors said the trip offered a first-hand glimpse of the potential of Vietnam and its 79 million people. Last year, the Clinton administration signed a landmark trade agreement with Hanoi, reducing tariffs on a variety of goods and services. The pact still awaits congressional approval.
“Once the U.S.-Vietnam trade agreement is ratified, that would put OC in a very good position to be a gateway point for trade flows between the two countries,” said Kim-Yen Huynh, assistant vice president of the Garden Grove office of Los Angeles-based California Center Bank, who was on the trade mission.
For now, trade between OC and Vietnam is minimal. The country doesn’t show up on the list of OC’s top export markets. And representatives from the county’s largest global companies say they aren’t rushing to set up in Vietnam.
“We are cautiously optimistic about Vietnam,” said Jeannie Herbert, a spokeswoman for Beckman Coulter Inc., a maker of medical diagnostic products. The Fullerton-based company currently sells products to Vietnam through its Hong Kong office, which serves dealers in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
“We’re still waiting to see how viable that market is going to be,” said Dan Chmielewski, a spokesman for Rainbow Technologies Inc., an Irvine provider of computer security software and hardware devices, which has a few small customers in Vietnam.
Aliso Viejo-based engineering giant Fluor Corp., which does business in a variety of emerging markets from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, has no immediate plans for doing business in Vietnam, according to a spokesman. But the company is watching the market there, he said.
Because of the former U.S. trade embargo, OC and other U.S. companies are relative latecomers to Vietnam, where Japanese and European companies have staked out the market for more than a decade.
OC shares a natural, if not sometimes contentious, affinity with Vietnam. Pham and others on the trade mission touted OC’s Vietnamese population as a link between the two areas.
“Before the mission, it seemed no one we talked to had any idea that so many Vietnamese live here in OC,” Pham said.
Little Saigon is home to more than 200,000 ethnic Vietnamese,the largest concentration outside Vietnam, according to Vietnamese-American chamber estimates. The area is home to some 2,500 Vietnamese-owned businesses, according to an estimate from Project Development’s Martin.
Pham said the Vietnamese he met are keen on developing closer relations with what they refer to as overseas Vietnamese or “Viet Kieu”,any Vietnamese living outside Vietnam. Aside from Little Saigon, another 1 million Vietnamese expatriates and their offspring live in other parts of the U.S.
“People in Vietnam are very interested in learning about how we do business here,” Pham said. “They are friendly and open, as long as you don’t talk about politics.”
Project Development’s Martin said he sees potential in Vietnam for OC manufacturers, drug makers and medical device producers.
The company, which taps multilateral banks to source funding for government-backed projects, is looking to get involved with large projects in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
“The opportunities in Vietnam are really tremendous for OC companies at this point because the country has so many natural resources that allow industry to go in there fairly quickly,” said David Glass, marketing director for Project Development. “They’ve got plenty of land and a lot of untapped natural gas. The country has good port systems already in place.” n
