Last month, a fellow Wall Street Daily writer touted the plentiful opportunities in India and China – two BRIC countries notable as emerging markets.
But BRIC is so 10 years ago…
In 2009, CIVETS – Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa – was the new scorching-hot trend.
Fast forward to today, and not all of the CIVETS countries are as appealing as they were six years ago.
Vietnam continues to shine, however. In fact, Vietnam is the No. 2 most-watched country by multinational investors, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Frontiers blog and FSG’s Frontier Market Sentiment Index!
And now is the perfect time to strike!
It’s Not Just Wet Rice
The National Financial Supervisory Commission forecasts that Vietnam’s economic growth will reach an annual rate of 5.4% in the first quarter, with a full-year target of 6.2%.
The commission also predicts that the average annual core inflation will be 3% this year due to low oil prices and inflation declining in recent years.
The country has benefited from lower wages than other Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members, and its demographics have been more promising with relatively high literacy rates – producing a workforce with the drive and skills for factory labor.
The country is well known for building its civilization on thousands of years of wet rice farming. But now, it’s a major producer and exporter of many other agriculture commodities.
Vietnam has 10.3 million hectors of arable land, much of which is devoted to profitable agricultural exports, representing $30 billion per annum, or 20% of its total exports.
In fact, average Vietnam agriculture exports to the United States from 2011 through 2013 were $1.17 billion, which is close to double that of Japan at $521 million, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Trade growth for Vietnam has been explosive, too.
