As of last week, we’ve now been to 48 of the 50 states here in the good ole US of A. We scratched Alaska off our list courtesy of the World Affairs Alaska who hosted a program about China we spoke at. Anchorage is a marvelous town even in cold February and the World Affairs folks could not have been more gracious hosts. One thing, among many, that we did not know about Anchorage is how diverse its population is. At the high school across from where we talked more than 100 languages are spoken. The U.S., even Alaska, is a nation of immigrants.
On our flight home from the east coast to where we traveled immediately after Alaska, we sat next to an immigrant even while we were reading the excellent book, Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success. He has lived in Seattle for three years since immigrating from Pakistan. When he first arrived he worked in a restaurant. One night there was a Seattle equivalent of a blizzard, or what Alaskans call a light flurry. Nonetheless, the buses were not running. Our seatmate did not have a car and called his boss, a man who had immigrated from Pakistan a number of years before he did, and told him he had no way to get to work and couldn’t make it. His boss told him if he was going to succeed in America he had to find a way to make it to his job. So our seatmate proceeded to walk six hours through the snow—the first time he had ever seen snow—all the way to the restaurant. We could tell that even if it had been Alaska snow he would have found a way in to work. An amazing story…and yet this was probably only the 16th most amazing tale he told us. Someday we might write it all up. In the meantime, we write about Vietnam’s high tech success, which two companies dominate the Internet and how China will liberalize. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, not giving up posting New Orleans Mardi Gras videos for Lent.
The Krewe of Dolly (yes, dedicated to Dolly Parton) marches during Carnival Season. Only in New Orleans
We are also not giving up INTN for Lent but are off next week. Back on March 9th.
Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
High Tech Vietnam
From our travels to and interactions with Vietnam, we are very aware that Vietnam is moving up the supply chain from textiles to high tech. Apple, Samsung, Boeing, Microsoft and others are all now manufacturing high tech goods there. Vietnam is perhaps still a cub but growing into a new Asian Tiger. What we were less aware of is Vietnam’s high tech software and services sector. Bloomberg Technology reports that a variety of Silicon Valley folks are now in Ho Chi Minh City launching start ups. One such American they interviewed, Vinnie Lauria, says, “Southeast Asia is going to be a global growth engine in the next 10 years and Vietnam will be at the center of it.” The article notes that the number of startups in Vietnam doubled since the pandemic rising to 3000 from 1600. A KPMG/HSBC report highlights VNG, an app giant in Vietnam, that is likely to be listed in the U.S. soon. VNG has investors from Singapore, the U.S. and China, reflecting the continued globalization of our world (once again those saying globalization is dead are dead wrong). Unsurprisingly, VNG, and others in Vietnam, have begun using Chat GPT3. Vietnam is going through some challenges currently, and it needs to become better at building infrastructure and developing a more responsive bureaucracy, but it continues to be one of the more promising markets and societies in the world.
Top 50 Websites
As Chat GPT3 crossed over 50 million users within a month of its public launch**, we were curious what are currently the most visited websites in the world. According to Similarweb, an Israeli web analytics company, the most visited website in the world remains Google, with 85.1 billion visitors per month. Second is Youtube (owned by the good evil corporate folks at Google Alphabet). In fact, Visual Capitalist tells us that “Google and Youtube attract more traffic than the next 48 websites combined.” TikTok, for those wondering, is ranked 18th. Eight of the top ten websites are all headquartered in the U.S. The exceptions being the popular search engines of China (Baidu) and Russia (Yandex). We guess INTN cannot be found in either search engine. The U.S. is home to 30 of the top 50 websites. Russia is second with 5, followed by China. If the large language models of Chat GPT3 and their ilk are successful, China and Russia’s websites will probably fall lower on this list in the future. In those countries VPNs will become even more popular.
**Chat GPT’s staying power will depend on improvements and smart adaptions of the technology.
China Corner: All Politics Are Local
As part of the program in Alaska we participated in, students from the University of Alaska debated whether China will ever democratize. “Ever” is a long time. We predict China will democratize some day and certainly in the lifetime of our children, if we had any, and even possibly in our lifetime if we lay off the King Cake and get lucky health-wise. A more interesting question than if China will liberalize politically is how it will happen. We mentioned in this space last fall that we expect dissension, if it occurs, will come at the local level. And that’s because with China in a new economic era of lower GDP growth and a popped real estate bubble, local and provincial governments will struggle financially. Remember that much of these local governments revenue comes from land sales. As you can see in the chart below from Girard DiPippo, land sales have dropped like a weather balloon shot out of the sky…and thus so too local government revenues. In recent months China has been trying to re-prop up the real estate market. It might be successful in the short run but will likely have continued troubles in the medium and long term. This will lead to some unhappy local officials, not to mention unhappy local residents affected by broke local governments. We predict it will be somewhere outside of Beijing from where the spark will light the dissension fires. When? We do not know.
