Yet even that assured manager will have to face his unglamorous future: a look at the total sales figures of autos assembled in Vietnam (including those that began production mid-year) tells the story.
According to industry information -- never before released to the public -- the company which sold the most cars last year was VMC: 2,059.
Behind them was Daewoo, with 1,463 sales, 958 Mekongs, and 555 Daihatsu trucks, 489 Toyotas, and 405 Mitsubishi vans. Mercedes sold a mix of vehicles totaling 383; Suzuki sold 128 light trucks, with the rest registering under 25 vehicles sold. Ka-ching. Lousy for a dealership, let alone a country.
Total vehicle registrations for 1996 were 34,200.
A stroll around any operating auto plant is characterized by parking areas more crammed than the day of the church bazaar.

For general managers who recently arrived and have found their favorite sushi restaurants or hamburger joints, they are probably about due to take a hard look at their market, some for the first time. While in most cases they did not personally decide their companies should be here, nevertheless their plants, perhaps coming on line in a matter of weeks or months, will have capacity to assemble from 7,000 to 25,000 vehicles per year with a total capacity of 180,000. Any one of the plants could handle next year's demand. The picture is not rosy.

That's why foreign auto makers are spending their first political currency on protectionist legislation. In March, the Ministry of Industry, anxious to watch a parts industry form around these plants and according to industry members increasingly sympathetic, hosted a meeting of automakers in HCMC.
At the meeting, automakers formed a consensus that their central problems are the loose import of second-hand vehicles and quota restrictions on the kits they must import to assemble their vehicles here, known as "CKDs" and "SKDs." In addition, they proposed that imported models identical to those being produced in Vietnam be banned.
Their last concern was that with 13 plants expected to be operating by 1998, localization of 10% in five years and 30% in ten was too high under current conditions. Recently the measure of localization was determined by the MoI to be according to value, not content.
"We understand the position of our foreign partners," top Ministry of Industry official Tran Minh Huan told this reporter. While "urging them to carry out localization as soon as possible," he suggested that the first deadline could be pushed back a couple of years. Huan, intent on fostering domestic plants that produce electronics, rubber, accessories, and the other parts that make up 65% of the average vehicle, was frank about his dilemma, in which the average parts-maker needs at least 60,000 units before production is viable.
"We issued too many licenses," the MoI official said he now realized. "If we had issued only four to six licenses, it could be possible. No more licenses." Wasnt this considered two years ago? "We forgot. We should have issued fewer," he said. That ministrys consulting companies, which were hired by various auto companies to produce feasibility studies on their behalf, might have disagreed at the time. Nevertheless, that question, which had been plaguing industry members for two years, was thereby unceremoniously retired.Yet the biggest immediate problem for automakers is entirely out of bounds of the Ministry of Industry.
Second-hand trucks from South Korea and Japan, and autos from Japan and the US have for the past three years served market demand exceedingly well, even after taxes of 200% applied to those legally imported.
All but 7,000 of the 34,000 vehicles registered last year were second-hand. "No country that allows second hand auto imports has an auto industry," said one assembler. Now they're all demanding protection.