News Mania Desk/ Piyal Chatterjee / 18th September 2024
During a visit to the US next week, To Lam, the president of the ruling Communist Party in Vietnam, is scheduled to meet with officials of major US businesses, including Google and Meta, according to two sources briefed about the plans who spoke to Reuters.
According to a Reuters story from last month, Google manufactures its handsets there through vendors and has plans to build a sizable data center. Meta’s Facebook has one of its largest user bases worldwide in the nation of 100 million people.
Lam is expected to meet with representatives of Google and Meta on his first visit to the US since taking the most influential position in the party in early August, according to the two persons, who also noted that each company would have a separate meeting.
Lam will also go to a business forum on September 23 along with other representatives of US businesses, according to two other sources who are aware of the arrangements.
One of the event’s organizers, the US-ASEAN Business Council (USABC), failed to provide a participation list on September 23. Remarks were not returned by Facebook or Google.
Over the course of the last 18 months, the USABC lobbying group organized two sizable US business missions in Vietnam, which attracted scores of leading US enterprises from the energy, ICT, and defense sectors.
According to participation lists reviewed by Reuters, companies that participated in both of the most recent missions to Vietnam included power provider AES, aircraft behemoth Boeing, financial major Mastercard, and Amazon, including its cloud computing subsidiary Amazon Web Services.
Vietnam is viewed by US businesses as a market and a center for manufacturing. Numerous products of Apple are completed by its suppliers in that location; Intel operates a sizable chip assembly plant there; and defense companies have been in discussions to supply security equipment to Hanoi for some time.
Although Lam’s visit to the US has not yet been officially confirmed, representatives indicated he will arrive on Saturday to give a speech at the UN General Assembly, which is scheduled to take place from September 22–23 and brings together world leaders. Later this week, he will take a plane to Cuba for the last part of his journey.
