Shifting Production to Southeast Asia

Shifting Production to Southeast Asia: Electronics Transnational Corporations Moving to Vietnam since the 2000s explores how a labor-intensive industry has been expanded from the ‘World Factory’ - China to developing Southeast Asia under the changing dynamics in the global and regional production networks, including the recent COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tension, by using the case study of the production relocations of the consumer electronics manufacturing industry to Vietnam. David Yuen Tung Chan and Chun Yang explore the changing trade and investment patterns as well as the transformations of the electronics production networks and the changing roles and functions of China, Vietnam and other Asian countries, the relocations of firms and the strategic coupling with Vietnam, as well as the impacts of the post-pandemic dynamics. The shifting electronics production from China to Vietnam, which increased since the mid-2000s, is not a simple expansion led by the conventional lead firms from the 'North' solely to cut costs, but it is a rather complicated and multiscale process that has been simultaneously driven by various tiers of firms and levels of governments from different origins out of various dynamics at different spatial scales.