If one billion people are to be believed, a video app owned by ByteDance, just one of several Chinese Decacorns, is a key part of their daily lives. TikTok has minted millionaires from teenagers just editing their lives and playful pranks into short bursts of music-backed mayhem.
Tik-Tok goes the clock for one of ByteDance’s subsidiaries
In some ways, it is a shame that the app is too complicated for boomers (for whom Twitter and Instagram are the far-flung-end of the digital universe, and who never got to grips with Snapchat). If Trump used TikTok as his go-to medium for spreading his version of the world rather than Twitter, then ByteDance’s progeny may have been spared the tick-tock countdown of 45 days before its forced sale or shutdown.
I fear this is just the tip of an iceberg in the battle for global supremacy. One hegemon’s attempts to turn the tide back. Trump channeling those who pushed King Canute to show it was not possible. There is much at stake. In addition to 2019’s tirade on trade, the accusations of coronavirus warfare in early 2020 have spiraled into a cold-war of words and actions that threatened to pull the rug from under the table of globalization. Trump seems able to push on this topic in his election year, in part as there is bipartisan support against China. The dominance of the US and all it stands for is at stake.
This is exemplified in the hitherto unrivaled dominance of the US dollar. The US has enjoyed a monopoly on currency for many years, and the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency has afforded it tremendous direct and indirect advantages. Direct, as it can simply print more of the stuff, safe in the knowledge that the world needs dollars for trade. Indirect, as the US is the clearing-house for much of the worlds’ financial transaction flow. As banks such as Standard Chartered and HSBC have found out to their shareholders’ great costs, if you upset the US by playing with people they do not like (Iranians, Cubans to name but two) the threat of having your global business torn down, is enough to have you penitently writing billion-dollar cheques to the US treasury.
The days of the dollar may be numbered. The recent rapid rise in the price of Gold may be the moment where the world tries to wean itself off the mighty greenback. Emerging market currencies, including the Chinese Renminbi, may enter a period of strengthening, after a decade of weakness. The Euro has also risen in recent months, in a period where France’s President Macron is also envisioning a world where the US is not, unthinkably perhaps, Europe’s BFF.
Given the bi-partisan support in the US for China-bashing, further declines in the US-China relations are likely. Go-to Apps such as WeChat and TikTok will be removed from the Appstore — so new App stores will emerge. Apple’s stranglehold and 30% shakedown on App-developers will be challenged further. The US will no longer be an exit for US private equity investors in China growth technology stocks, they will list in Shanghai and Hong Kong instead. It’s not all lost. China and the US will not go to actual war — there is too much at stake. The war will be a war of Apps and market dominance and ultimately the winner will be determined by the users, themselves. China is indeed in your hand, as T’Pau once sang.
The lake shone mercury white as the plane began its descent to Mandalay airport. I checked my i-phone’s clock, ‘16:43’, and adjusted it back by 90 minutes to get to local time.
“Take me back to Mandalay. Where the flying fishes play. And the sunshine comes like thunder over China across the bay.”
The wistful ‘music-hall’ poem about a serviceman’s longing for the tropics after returning to England was penned by a 24-year-old Rudyard Kipling in 1890 on his own return to England after seven years in India.
But which bay? Mandalay is landlocked. Kipling never came to Mandalay, he only spent three days in Burma (now Myanmar) and mostly in Rangoon (now Yangon). Yet his words are the British-bulldog theme for Burma. Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, came and stayed longer. He traveled and worked in many parts of Burma and certainly traveled to Mandalay, en route to the hill-station of May-Mo (now Pin Oo Lin) where he was stationed for four years as part of the British-India police force.
One of Orwell’s May-Mo haunts — a hill station 50 miles from Mandalay
I always picture Orwell in the latter part of his life — hand-rolled cigarette in mouth, scrappy hair, glasses, and the tatter-tatter of the keyboard. This image was on the back of several of his Penguin published books, including 1984, Burmese Days, and Animal Farm that I read as a schoolboy more than three decades ago. But it is The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out In Paris and London that I remember more vividly. As I walked the streets of Maymo I tried to imagine how Orwell would have felt as a young serviceman in 1920’s Burma, but it was only the tobacco-stained newspaper-man who came to mind.
George Orwell would have read Kipling’s Road to Mandalay. Maybe it was sung in the British Club or the Candacraig hotel in Maymo on the Gin and Bridge nights that feature in his famous Burma tale. Kipling’s son John, to whom the famous poem ‘If’ was written in 1895, died during the First World War at the bloody Battle of Loos in 1915. He had followed Kitchener’s call to serve the nation in the New Army. ‘If’ was widely printed after its publication in 1910, and likely would often have been framed in Officers’ quarters across British India. We also know that Orwell greatly admired Kitchener, and even before arriving in Burma, when the General died at sea at the hand of a German U-boat torpedo, Orwell wrote an obituary:
KITCHENER
No stone is set to mark his nation’s loss, No stately tomb enshrines his noble breast; Not e’en the tribute of a wooden cross Can mark this hero’s rest.
He needs them not, his name untarnished stands, Remindful of the mighty deeds he worked, Footprints of one, upon time’s changeful sands, Who ne’er his duty shirked.
Who follows in his steps no danger shuns, Nor stoops to conquer by a shameful deed, An honest and unselfish race he runs, From fear and malice freed.
(Copyright the Orwell Foundation 2020, Published in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard 21st July 1916)
Burma had a history of British poets and writers grace its shores. Perhaps the earliest was John Leyden, better known to Scotsmen as the poet of Teviotdale, and the friend of Sir Walter Scott. John was a medical doctor who wrote on the languages and literature of the Indochinese nations. He was a surgeon in India, a professor, and also a judge at Calcutta. In1811 he accompanied the Governor-General to Java, and died from a fever caught in the bad air of a warehouse of books he had rushed to examine at Batavia (as Jakarta, the capital, was then known). Sir Walter Scott honoured Leyden’s memory with the following:
Vietnam is a high growth market situated in the heart of Asia. Its cohesive population of 100m people is young, hard-working and increasingly digitally connected. Over the last 30 years, Vietnam has experienced high levels of GDP growth, averaging about 6 to 7% and attracting record levels of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) with almost USD 20 bn in 2019. It also is an increasingly open economy, with trade equivalent to 200% of GDP, and the government has negotiated a number of free trade agreements. Vietnam is one of the original countries in what was formerly known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership TPP and is now the somewhat unpronounceable alphabet soup of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CTCPP). In addition, Vietnam recently approved a bilateral EU free trade agreement, which could serve as a model for a new free trade agreement with the UK.
Perhaps more important than a static GDP number is the per capita GDP which has just recently passed USD 3,000, which is considered an inflection point in an emerging consumer society. For example, Thailand doubled its GDP from this point in seven years and China doubled its GDP within five years.
Vietnam has emerged from the COVID-19 crisis as a winner. Its capital markets are set for expansion, the infrastructure is improving, and it will continue to attract interest from manufacturers and other types of companies looking to diversify away from China.
V for Victory – against the coronavirus
Vietnam declared war on the coronavirus in late January and emerged victorious in containing it within about 90 days by the end of April. The government was very quick to react when the first cases were confirmed during the Lunar New Year (‘Tet’) holiday in January by imposing a large-scale quarantine, stopping flights to China, and implementing control and trace to identify outbreaks. It also employed all the tools in the ‘media’ armory to keep its citizens informed via social media, traditional media, as well as propaganda art.
Vietnam is in many ways a Confucian ‘East-Asian’ society, with strong community values, and adherence to authority. Its social cohesion and the government’s effective response meant that Vietnam was one of the first countries to come out of lockdown at the end of April after a relatively short three-week lockdown. Since mid-April, there have been no community spread cases, and remarkably, in a population of close to 100m people, there have been less than 420 infected cases in total and zero deaths. The closest someone came to death was a British pilot with Vietnam Airlines, the National Carrier, an unfortunate super-spreader at a popular expat-bar in Ho Chi Minh City’s District Two. He was in a coma and at death’s door for almost 100 days in an Intensive Care Unit in Vietnam. The Vietnamese people rallied around him, even offering him their own lungs, and he went on to make a complete and full recovery. He has now returned to his home city of Motherwell in the UK, saying that ‘I would have died’ if it were not for Vietnam.
As a frontier market, it is estimated that only one in five emerging market investors are present: it will be a game-changer in a few years if and when Vietnam is classified as an MSCI Emerging Market.
V-Shaped recovery
Vietnam has the potential to make a V-shape road to recovery post-pandemic. The Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) rose sharply from the depths of the pandemic, as the country gradually went back to work. Retail sales have also been rising, though some discretionary spending has been unsurprisingly delayed. The GDP growth for the first six months of 2020 was 1.8%, and the full year is expected to be somewhere between 3% and 4%. This is lower than the 6-7% trend but is a rare positive number in a world of fearful negative growth forecasts.
Prospects for Vietnam will be strengthened as more manufacturers look to its proximity to key markets and abundant, well-educated and young workforce as a powerful source of production. Last year’s trade spat between the US and China accelerated a ‘China-plus-one’ strategy as supply chains are increasingly being broadened in an attempt to diversify risk and bend costs down. Vietnam has seen decades of strong FDI into the manufacturing sector and has enhanced its logistics and business-to-business (B2B) services to facilitate this growth. A number of international companies have started to relocate to Vietnam, and there is strong evidence of that trend continuing as Apple and other global brands look to increase what they make in Vietnam. That will also have a positive knock-on effect in the private sector. In the 1980s and 1990s countries such as Singapore and Thailand adopted a Michael-Porter inspired ‘cluster’ approach to creating centres of specialized large-scale manufacturing (for hard disk drives, semiconductors, and cars). This approach can lead to a localized supply chain for the brand-owner and its myriad of sub-contractors. This notion has already attracted Samsung, which makes nearly every tablet and phone in Vietnam with close to 100,000 employees across the country and has accelerated the expansion of Vietnam’s industrial parks.
In addition to the planned investment by the government into infrastructure (a total amount of USD 30 bn over the next few years), Vietnam’s private sector will also see increasing opportunities. The government recently passed a Private-Public-Partnership (PPP) law to encourage private investment as a means to finance infrastructure. Unlike the UK where the government plans ‘brown-field’ rejuvenation of existing commercial and retail centres in an attempt to breathe life into hollowed-out sectors, much of the infrastructure development in Vietnam is in ‘green-field’ projects. This could have a multiplier effect on economic growth.
After a few years of hibernation, the privatization of state-owned assets and enterprises looks likely to resume this year. The government is committed to selling off selected equity stakes in listed companies that it still owns, as well as privatizing businesses for the first time. One of the stakes set for sale is in the country’s largest brewer (and the world’s 20th largest brewer by volume) Sabeco (HOSE: SAB), which produces the popular Saigon and ‘333’ rice-brewed beers.
Most importantly perhaps for investors, is the way in which the capital markets have grown and deepened. Daily liquidity across Vietnam’s stock markets is currently around USD 350m. This is more than the entire size of the market back when the UK’s Prudential (now Eastspring) was an early successful investor on behalf of its Vietnamese life insurance customers in the capital markets.
Although Vietnam has many of the characteristics of a more recognized ‘emerging market’ in part due to the size of the equity market already being above USD 160 bn, and with more than 1,500 companies to invest in, it is still classified by MSCI as a frontier market. In fact, this year Vietnam is likely to be the largest component of the Frontier Market Index. As a frontier market, it is estimated that only one in five emerging market investors are present: it will be a game-changer in a few years if and when Vietnam is classified as an MSCI Emerging Market.
Vietnam has emerged from the COVID-19 crisis as a winner. Its capital markets are set for expansion, the infrastructure is improving, and it will continue to attract interest from manufacturers and other types of companies looking to diversify away from China. Its macro-economic position is the envy of much of the world, and this could improve in a scenario where the US dollar weakens. Clearly the world as a whole is facing uncertainties, and there will be winners and losers ahead. Vietnam has signaled the ‘V’ for Victory sign against the devastating coronavirus, and this fast-growing country of 100m people is one to keep an eye out for in the months and years ahead.
Much has been written elsewhere about how Vietnam defeated Covid-19’s initial waves in 90 days. In a country of close to 100 million people, it is remarkable that there have been no confirmed deaths. As UK Prime Minister Johnson said, “the virus thrives on ambivalence”, and perhaps that is why this country was able to succeed where so many others have succumbed. A combination of quick action: closing borders, imposing quarantine and military efficiency and effective communication: TikTok videos, traditional media and propaganda posters (above) helped pull the nation’s actions into a cohesive plan. The country’s lockdown in April was relatively short, less than three weeks, and then the hard-working nation got back to work.
No new community spread cases in the last 90 days
Travel Travails
Vietnam’s borders remain pretty much closed to tourists and non-essential travel. Arrivals must undergo two weeks quarantine, currently in state facilities, but soon possibly in swanky hotels. This is a sensible approach to protect the 90 day record of no community-spread cases of Covid-19. Although the international tourism market will suffer as a result – probably until next year – the domestic tourism market is getting a boost. Popular destinations like Hoi An, and the coastal resorts, will no doubt be even more charming without the swarms of North Asian tourists in their pineapple-print shirts and matching shorts. The airline industry has been hit hard and National Carrier Vietnam Airlines is seeking government help to the tune of about US$ 500m.
Some Motherwell’s Son
One of Vietnam Airlines’ pilots, a Brit from Lanarkshire, Scotland – an ardent Motherwell supporter – has a lot to thank Vietnam for. He was an unfortunate carrier of more than passengers in April, and brought Covid-19 to a popular expat bar in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 2. He became very sick, and his lungs became like sacks of cement, putting him at death’s door, and with a real-chance of being Vietnam’s only Covid-19 fatality. He spent close to 100 days in an ICU in Ho Chi Minh City, and received excellent healthcare. Several Vietnamese people even offered to be lung-transplant donors to save the life of the British pilot. Thankfully, he made a full recovery, and is safely back in Scotland. It appears that his local football club is seeking a new sponsor for the next season, maybe Vietnam Airlines can be allowed to use some of its subsidy to get its name on the jersey of its newest fan. The pilot said that he would have died, had he been anywhere other than Vietnam.
