Leader To Lam hosted South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, marking their second meeting in less than a year, as Hanoi seeks more support for its high-tech ambitions from its top investor.
Lee, who last met with To Lam in August, arrived in Hanoi yesterday with a large business delegation after visiting India and is scheduled to have two days of meetings.
At least a dozen government cooperation agreements are planned and a goal to boost bilateral trade flows to US$150bil (RM592.4bil) by 2030 is likely to be reaffirmed.
Trade rose 9.6% last year to US$89bil (RM351.5bil), according to the Vietnamese government.
Seoul intends to “expand cooperation in strategic areas such as nuclear power plants, infrastructure, scientific and technological innovation, and to further cooperate on global issues such as supply chain stability, sustainable growth and climate change response,” Lee told representatives of the Korean community in Vietnam.
Vietnam, a major exporter of phones and other electronic goods, is keen to pivot to more sophisticated technologies.
Ahead of the visit, Vietnam’s Ambassador to South Korea, Vu Ho, was quoted as saying by local media that bilateral cooperation should focus on areas such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence.
South Korea is the largest investor in South-East Asia’s fastest- growing economy in terms of accumulated capital, and the Samsung group, which includes chip giant Samsung Electronics, is the biggest foreign corporate investor with more than US$20bil (RM79bil) mostly in electronic goods plants.
Samsung has been in talks with Vietnamese authorities for years about a possible back-end semiconductor factory, multiple sources familiar with the discussions have said.
Intel, Amkor and other multinationals have large back-end chip plants in Vietnam, focusing on labour-intensive assembling, testing and packaging of semiconductors.
But attempts by Hanoi to attract foreign investment in more advanced plants for chip production, known as fabs, have so far not yielded results. — Reuters
