Mergers and Acquisitions in Vietnam’s Emerging Market Economy, 1990-2009

This paper is the first major and thorough study on the M&A activities in Vietnam’s emerging market economy, covering almost entirely the M&A history after the launch of Doi Moi. The surge in these activities since mid-2000s by no means incidentally coincides with the jump in FDI and FPI inflows into the nation. M&A industry in Vietnam has its socio-cultural traits that could help explain economic happenings, with anomalies and transitional characteristics, far better than even the most complete set of empirical data. Proceeds from sales of existing assets and firms have mainly flowed into the highly speculative industries of securities, banking, non-bank financials, portfolio investments and real estates. The impacts of M&A on Vietnam’s long-term prosperity are, thus, highly questionable. An observable high degree of volatility in the M&A processes would likely blow outthe high ex ante expectations by many speculators, when ex post realizations finally arrive. The effect of the past M&A evolution in Vietnam has been indecisively positive or negative, with significant presence of rent-seeking and likelihood of causing destructive entrepreneurship. From a socio-economic and cultural view, the degree of positive impacts it may result in for domestic entrepreneurship will perhaps be the single most important indicator.

We want to touch IT. Are hybrid laptops just new fancy gadgets or a new revolution?

While the number of traditional laptops and computers sold has dipped slightly year over year, manufacturers have developed new hybrid laptops with touch screens to build on the tactile trend. This market is moving quickly to make touch the rule rather than the exception and the sales of these devices have tripled since the launch of Windows 8 in 2012, to reach more than sixty million units sold in 2015. Unlike tablets, that benefit from easy-to-use applications specially designed for tactile interactions, hybrid laptops are intended to be used with regular user-interfaces. Hence, one could ask whether tactile interactions are suited for every task and activity performed with such interfaces. Since hybrid laptops are increasingly used in educational situations, this study focuses on information search tasks which are commonly performed for learning purposes. It is hypothesized that tasks that require complex and/or less common gestures will increase user's cognitive load and impair task performance in terms of efficacy and efficiency. A study was carried out in a usability laboratory with 30 participants for whom prior experience with tactile devices has been controlled. They were asked to perform information search tasks on an online encyclopaedia by using only the touch screen of and hybrid laptop. Tasks were selected with respect to their level of cognitive demand (amount of information that had to be maintained in working memory) and the complexity of gestures needed (left and/or right clicks, zoom, text selection and/or input.), and grouped into 4 sets accordingly. Task performance was measured by the number of tasks succeeded (efficacy) and time spent on each task (efficiency). Perceived cognitive load was assessed thanks to a questionnaire given after each set of tasks. An eye tracking device was used to monitor users' attention allocation and to provide objective cognitive load measures based on pupil dilation and the Index of Cognitive Activity. Each experimental run took approximately one hour. The results of this within-subjects design indicate that tasks involving complex gestures led to a lower efficacy, especially when the tasks were cognitively demanding. Regarding efficacy, there is no significant differences between sets of tasks excepted for tasks with low cognitive demand and complex gestures that required more time to be achieved. Surprisingly, users that declared the biggest experience with tactile devices spent more time than less frequent users. Cognitive load measures indicate that participants reported having devoted more mental effort in the interaction when they had to use complex gestures.