Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Just came back from Ho Chi Minh this afternoon. This is my second time visiting Vietnam. My first and last time there was because of an exhibition in Hanoi. My company has been trying to establish overseas market so that we took up the exhibition and see if we can get some good partners.

However, the whole difficult part of recruiting overseas distributors is nobody wants to commit on a new brand to the market as it requires a lot of investment in terms of money, time and effort to build up a brand. For those distributors, they would rather look for the already established brands or those brands who are serious in entering the market and willing to invest in advertisement to build up the brand name. However, our case isn't like that. The management would not want to invest in big advertising budget unless we can really have some business there. I do understand the rational behind this as well as we do not have a lot of cash and it's very difficult to ensure this investment got real return. So we would need to look for other alternative way in terms of entering the market.

It's actually a dilemma for any markets. Without the investment, it's very difficult to build up any business but it's very difficult to ensure the return of the investment unless we really work on it. Therefore, I start to wonder what would be the result of the whole exercise. Unless I can get some magic formula, I do not see the possibility to start up any market like this, but what's the MAGIC FORMULA? The only way I can think of is to enter the market by ourselves or get serious partner to do some joint venture as nobody would be willing to invest in other people's brand especially a new and small brand.

Anyway, my colleague and I walked around the local market yesterday night after the meetings. To me, I find Vietnam very familiar as it's just like Taiwan when I was a little girl. To be frank, I felt the whole South East Asia is somehow quite similar. It's just at the different stage of development and I myself find it quite easy to adapt to the local environment because of the similarity. I always want to try some local food and experience how local people lives. So I'm always interested in exploring the local street side food. However, this time, I didn't really try it as my colleague might not find it ok. Hopefully, I can try some next time with some guidance from local people. Those road side food just looks much more interesting to me.



Actually, I did try some nice Vietnamese food this time as our local partners bring us around the city these two days, but I only managed to take pictures for the dinner that my colleague and I went for ourselves yesterday night. The famous beef noodle soup. It's really quite nice.