Vietnamese Manufacturing Emerges as an Antidote for What's Ailing China

Quick, name a consumer electronic product not made in China.

Unless you named a pre-production prototype or an individual part, you are probably mistaken.

Over the past dozen years, China has become the destination for low-cost contract manufacturing.

These days we assume that even modest volume consumer electronic projects will wind up in China.

MindTribe now provides Mandarin lessons to our engineers so our team can communicate better with our Chinese counterparts.

But just when we were getting comfortable with what to eat, where to stay, and how to move around places like Shanghai and Shenzhen - that is, to the extent one can get comfortable with things like thousand-year egg or breakfast squid, hotel porters who dress like matadors or gondola drivers, and van drivers who think the sidewalk is a car pool lane - China seems to be outgrowing its place in the global economic order.

Rapid growth in its Tier 1 & 2 cities is making China a victim of its own success.

Wages are heating up faster than a scrub oak in the Santa Anas, and traffic is slugging through the streets slower than a Super-Size dose of trans fat in your arteries.

The strength of the RMB has mainlanders snubbing even Hong Kong dollars, and has made ongoing investment increasingly expensive, compelling manufacturing jet setters to search for the next, next thing.

Just as green is the new black (or was that gray or brown?), ap parently Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC aka Saigon) is the new Guangzhou.

Say goodbye to "Ni hao." Say hello to "Xin chào."

For companies from Intel and Boeing to Jabil and Foxconn, Vietnam is becoming the new "it" destination for low cost manufacturing.

And since you may find yourself on that 20-hour journey sooner than you thought, we put together some handy tidbits to get you there and back.