The New York Times International - 31.07.2019

8 | WEDNESDAY, JULY 31, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

business

Even so, Vietnam, a nation of nearly 100 million, is not about to replace China as a manufacturing hub overnight. Land can be expensive, and ready-to-use factories and warehouses are in short supply. Recruiting enough trained workers and managers is another potential challenge. “It’s definitely stretching Vietnam’s capabilities,” said Frederick R. Burke, a managing director in Ho Chi Minh City for the law firm Baker McKenzie. Even though the country’s labor force is expanding by a million people a year, he added, “people are talking about labor shortages already.” Vietnam also does not have vast gal- axies of companies churning out spe- cialized components, parts and materials like those that manufacturers can call upon in China.

Tran Thu Thuy said that “of course” she would love to work with Apple some- day. Ms. Thuy’s firm, HTMP, makes metal molds that factories use to produce plastic and die-cast parts. She gestured toward a nearby MacBook. One day, she said, HTMP might be able to make the molds for metal laptop bodies. But she knows the company has to improve in many ways before then. “There’s a long list,” she said. Vietnam is already a colossus in pro- ducing shoes, clothes and other types of labor-intensive goods, having long ago begun siphoning business away from its giant northern neighbor. Nike and Adidas now make close to half of their sneakers in Vietnam. As factories have sprung up, the Vietnamese government has pledged to improve roads, ports and power plants. Hanoi has signed deals with governments around the world to reduce tariffs, including an agreement reached last month with the European Union. The Trump administration has not failed to notice that its import levies have been shifting global commerce in Vietnam’s direction. The Treasury has put Hanoi on a watch list for manipulat- ing the value of the Vietnamese cur- rency, the dong, to help exporters. Mr. Trump suggested last month that Viet- nam might be the next target for puni- tive tariffs, calling the country “almost the single worst abuser of everybody.” In response, the Vietnamese government said it wanted mutually beneficial trade ties with the United States, and it highlighted its efforts to punish exporters who illegally relabeled their goods as “Made in Vietnam” to dodge Ameri- can taxes. Yet even Mr. Trump’s feuding seems unlikely to reverse the broader shifts that are turning North Vietnam into a major hub for electronics. Many of the hulking factory complexes that stretch across the horizon in long, palm-fringed rows are there in no small part thanks to

one company. More than a decade ago, Samsung Electronics, the South Korean titan, set up a plant in Bac Ninh to reduce its de- pendence on China. The move was prescient. Costs in China continued to increase, and Samsung’s sales there

withered after Beijing called for boy- cotts on South Korean products because of Seoul’s embrace of an American mis- sile defense system in 2017. Samsung has since closed all but one of its smartphone plants in China. It now assembles around half of the handsets it

sells worldwide in Vietnam. Samsung’s subsidiaries in the country, which em- ploy around 100,000 people, accounted for nearly a third of the company’s $ billion in sales last year. A Samsung spokeswoman said about 90 percent of those sales involved goods

shipped from Vietnam to other coun- tries. That implies Samsung alone accounted for a quarter of Vietnam’s ex- ports in 2018, although even that might not fully capture the company’s effect on the wider economy. Samsung’s success in Vietnam helped convince many of its

South Korean suppliers that they needed to be here, too. “When you are a big company and you move to a place, everything follows you,” said Filippo Bortoletti, the deputy manager in Hanoi at the business advi- sory firm Dezan Shira. Some Vietnamese business owners say the blessings are mixed, though. Foreign giants, they say, come to Viet- nam and work largely with vendors they already use elsewhere, leaving little room in their supply chains for local up- starts. Samsung has 35 Vietnamese suppliers, the spokeswoman said. Apple declined to comment. When Samsung first set up in the country, it bought some of the metal fixtures used on its assembly lines from a local firm, Vietnam Precision Mechan- ical Service & Trading, or VPMS. But then more of Samsung’s South Korean partners started coming into the country, and after a year, Samsung and VPMS stopped working together, said Nguyen Xuan Hoang, one of the Viet- namese company’s founders. Price and quality were not the issue, Mr. Hoang said, over the hissing and clanging of machinery at his factory near Bac Ninh. The problem was scale: Samsung needed many more fixtures than VPMS could deliver. Vu Tien Cuong’s company, Fitek, produces industrial equipment for Sam- sung, Canon and other big companies around Bac Ninh. He acknowledged that most Vietnamese suppliers had quality and productivity issues that kept them from winning business from multi- national companies. But he thinks that the root problem is inexperience, not a lack of money or knowledge. “Day by day,” Mr. Cuong said, Viet- nam’s supplier base is improving and “growing up.”

Nguyen Thi Hue, 28, knows a thing or two about growing up on the job. For a long time after starting her own company in 2015, Ms. Hue worked 16-hour days juggling a day job for another company while getting her new venture off the ground. Her start-up, Anofa, specializes in surface treatments for metal parts. It has worked with suppliers for foreign brands like the South Korean electronics maker LG and the Italian motorcycle maker Ducati. “We really look forward” to Apple’s expanding its supply chain in Vietnam, said Nguyen Van Huan, Ms. Hue’s hus- band, who is also her lawyer. Anofa has invested in new machines to try to win more business from foreign clients. “They have higher standards and requirements,” Mr. Huan said. “We can meet them,” Ms. Hue said, beaming.

Vietnam tries to gather trade war spoils

V IETNAM, FROM PAGE 1

Chau Doan contributed reporting.

Above, the Vietnam Precision Mechanical Service & Trading factory near Bac Ninh, Vietnam. When Samsung set up in Vietnam, it bought metal fixtures from the company. Below right, Fitek, which produces equipment for Samsung, Canon and others. Below left, Anofa makes treatments for metal parts and has worked with suppliers for brands like LG.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LINH PHAM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Vietnam cannot compare with China. When we buy materials, it’s 5, 10 percent more expensive than China already.”

“It’s definitely stretching Vietnam’s capabilities.” The work force is growing, but “people are talking about labor shortages.”

notes. “If we changed the title, we could get rid of the hot guy,” she said. And yet the appeal of the younger man was undeniable. “The hot guy is more network salable,” Ms. Day coun- tered. “A lot of people are keen on the idea of this young person invigorating a bored person’s life.” If a manic pixie lacked a man to behold her, was she still a manic pixie? A network executive might begin to wonder. Their dilemma pointed to a paradox of the recent television renaissance. Clearly, the advent of prestige cable and streaming services has supported a pro- liferation of nonmale voices. Creators like Jill Soloway (“Transparent”), Jenji Kohan (“Orange Is the New Black”), Lena Dunham (“Girls”) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (“Fleabag”) have achieved an iconic status that might not have been possible a decade earlier. But for all the ways that the Netflix era has expanded opportunities for cer- tain auteurs, the entertainment industry is still a forbidding place for many women show creators. That’s because the economics of streaming are starting to resemble traditional broadcast television more than most highbrow viewers realize. According to industry reports, the two most-watched shows on Netflix last year were “The Office” and “Friends,” hardly graveyards for gender ster- eotypes. HBO, long the capital of small- screen taste-making, is under orders from its new corporate parent, AT&T, to add more shows that appeal to Middle America. Last year, Amazon revealed it was canceling three newer shows, including Jill Soloway’s self-consciously feminist “I Love Dick” and “One Missis- sippi,” by the comic Tig Notaro, because it reportedly sought “bigger, wider-audience series.” “They are trying to have massive, breakout global hits,” Rich Greenfield, a media industry analyst formerly at BTIG Research, said of Amazon. Publicly, the networks and streaming platforms stress their interest in attract- ing diverse talent. Some have even put money into grooming it. But privately, many executives are

leery of shows that break new ground on gender. “Each one of the platforms is now under tremendous pressure to drive massive subscriber growth,” said a former senior executive at a large dig- ital property. He added that former colleagues who invested too heavily in outsider voices — at the perceived expense of finding the next blockbuster — sometimes found their jobs at risk. “You quickly end up having conversations like, ‘How is what you’re doing connected to our com- mercial goals?’” the former executive said. The effect has been to keep the overall percentage of female series creators stable in recent years, at roughly one quarter. Women created about 20 percent of the shows that have aired on HBO so far this year, or will return to the network before the end of 2019, according to a Times tally reviewed by the network. HBO said that nearly half of its directors are women, and it has said that its standards for shows haven’t changed since the acquisition. At Amazon, women created about 15 percent of current shows, but about 40 percent of the new programs the company has ordered since a leadership change last year. When I spent time with Ms. Micucci and Ms. Day, the popular idea of a bo- nanza for women in television seemed at odds with what they and their peers experienced every day. “Hollywood is perfect at taking what you’re enthusiastic about and just drain- ing it till you’re not excited about it any- more,” Ms. Day said at one point. Even- tually, she and Ms. Micucci resolved to stick with the hot guy in the basement, at least long enough for the next round of producers to weigh in.

THE UNDERACHIEVING WHITE MALE In addition to Ms. Day, Ms. Micucci often collaborates with a comic and actress named Riki Lindhome. They met 13 years ago and formed a satirical music duo called Garfunkel and Oates, after the lesser-known members of two fa- mous musical tandems. In 2007, they up- loaded their first video to YouTube so

that Ms. Lindhome’s family and friends could watch it, only to later discover that the site had promoted them to its home page. Tens of thousands of people were tuning in. Over the years, they have re- corded videos about the hypocritical sexual mores of conservatives (“The Loophole”) and the deadening rituals of social media (“Happy Birthday to My Loose Acquaintance”). They have mocked the oppressive odor of bro-cul- ture, and the oppressive smugness of pregnant women. They have also be- come close friends and collaborators, sharing a bank account for their work together, an accumulation of audition traumas and even a part-time assistant. On the day that I tagged along with Ms. Micucci, they borrowed a friend’s living room to shoot a music video about an office functionary named Chris, who is worried that the shifting gender zeit- geist will threaten his cushy desk job. It is ultimately a song about the narcis- sism of the underachieving white male, summed up by the refrain: “Before we worry about solving / centuries of op- pression / we can’t forget to ask / the most important question: What’s gonna happen to you, Chris?”

“MAKING THE MEN LAUGH” The song seemed born of personal ob- servation, as if Hollywood, too, has been set up to make ordinary guys comfort- able and talented women schvitz. It was tempting to mine it for clues about the fate of Garfunkel and Oates. In 2013, the television network IFC signed up Ms. Micucci and Ms. Lind- home to produce and star in a sitcom about two women in a comedy band who are trying to catch a break in show business and in romance — a series about themselves, in other words. But Ms. Micucci felt the network was stifling her and Ms. Lindhome. IFC executives scrapped the duo’s original pi- lot and discarded some of the elements the pair was most attached to, later in- structing them to open the show’s “aper- ture.” The experience yielded a single, eight-episode season. “It was really hard, and it was unlike the norm for most shows,” said Ms. Micucci, who nonetheless remains proud of the final product. That comics have chafed at meddling executives for as long as comedy has been on television makes it hard to as- sign blame — all the more so given that

Ms. Micucci and Ms. Lindhome had little experience writing a scripted series. But the numbers argue that in the era of Peak TV, women comics still face seri- ous obstacles. For all the success of a set of critical darlings — like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Insecure” and “Russian Doll,” to name a few — there is just one late- night-style show featuring a well-known female comic: “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” on TBS. Netflix canceled Michelle Wolf’s offering after a single season, and Hulu canceled Sarah Silverman’s after two. And while the comedian Lilly Singh will take over a show on NBC this year, the odds get even longer for women of color. “When I first started comedy, my male comic friends would say, ‘You have to focus on making the men laugh,’ ” Ms. Silverman told GQ last year, before the ax fell. “ ‘The women only laugh if their date laughs.’” Dan Pasternack, the IFC executive who oversaw the Garfunkel and Oates show, said the pressure from the network partly reflected a change in leadership during production, which made IFC more risk averse. (An IFC representa- tive declined to comment.) But he added, “There’s always that struggle you have with corporate people about, ‘Oh, so this is a show with two women at the center of it.’ ” He said he found such con- cerns misguided.

“THAT MAGICAL PHONE CALL” One challenge of hanging out with ac- tors from a sitcom inspired by their comedy duo: You’re never entirely sure if you’re observing their actual friendship, or them “doing” their friendship. Or, for that matter, an impression of an impression of their friendship. After a recording session in Holly- wood, Ms. Micucci and Ms. Lindhome grabbed dinner and then retreated to Ms. Lindhome’s place, a cavernous loft with a swing dangling from the ceiling. They needed to rehearse for a live per- formance that evening, but first they wanted to toy with writing a parody of a tragic song, like “Desperado.” “What would be the funniest topic?” Ms. Lind-

home asked, playing the languid melo- d y. “A song about all the different milk op- tions,” Ms. Micucci said. “There are so many. Whole milk, 2 percent, 1 percent, skim. Then you’ve got almond, then you’ve got oat.” “What is oat milk?” Ms. Lindhome be- gan to sing, then paused to wonder, “Why are people doing that now?” “Actually, I really like oat milk,” Ms. Micucci confessed. Ms. Micucci is trying to sell multiple shows, including a children’s program for which she is writing a script. “You always hope for that magical phone call,” she said, when I asked about her ambi- tions. “I hope that can happen — to be a lead in a TV comedy.” “Right now,” she added, “I don’t know what my next big thing is.”

FUTURE BELONGS TO WOMEN That night, Ms. Micucci and Ms. Lind- home went to Bar Lubitsch, where they were scheduled to perform in a weekly comedy show called Jetpack. When Ms. Micucci and Ms. Lindhome took the stage, the audience seemed ready to move on from the 50-something white guys. Some of the night’s loudest laughter came during an edgy riff in their new song about the relentlessly mediocre office worker “Chris”: “If this was a marriage, he’d be the wife,” “If this was the apocalypse, he’d be a butter knife.” Jazz Ponce, a teacher who doubles as one of the show’s talent bookers, cackled uncontrollably. The evening seemed to suggest something larger. Comedy can be a particular slog for the voicey feminist. Beyond the risk-averse executives and monochro- matic writers’ rooms is the problem of the comics themselves: Any job that in- volves making crowds of strangers laugh will hold a special allure for dam- aged men. And yet there are moments when you suspect the future belongs to the women. “We haven’t performed in like a month; it felt so good to get back out there,” Ms. Lindhome said afterward. “Maybe in the new year,” Ms. Micucci said, “we can book a couple more dates.”

For women, the reality of Peak TV has been complicated

WOMEN, FROM PAGE 7

Kate Micucci, left, and Riki Lindhome, her partner in Garfunkel and Oats, videotaping a new YouTube video at a friend’s house borrowed for the shoot.

ELIZABETH LIPPMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

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The New York Times International - 31.07.2019

Vietnam tries to gather trade war spoils

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