BAC NINH, Vietnam (AP) — The transformation of Vietnam’s Bac Ninh is evident in the signs above its shops and the spicy Chinese and Korean dishes on its tables.
Once known for its rice fields and the love duets of its centuries-old Quan Ho folk songs, the city just north of Hanoi has become one of Vietnam’s busiest factory zones, reflecting a surge of investment, hastened by President Donald Trump’s tariff hikes, that are reshaping the region.
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The economy has profited from friction between Washington and Beijing as factories shifted out of China, joining earlier waves of foreign investment by the Japanese and South Koreans that have made Vietnam a global manufacturing hub. But rising labor costs, worker shortages and inadequate infrastructure are exposing the limits to its rapid rise.
With rivals like Indonesia and the Philippines competing hard for new projects, Vietnam is trying to climb into higher-value manufacturing and expand export markets to maintain that momentum. That effort is evident in Bac Ninh.
Vietnam is building more capacity
Traditionally a center for artisans, Bac Ninh’s first boom began around 2008 when Samsung built its first phone factory there, turning Vietnam into its largest offshore manufacturing base.
Now, Chinese companies are pouring in as they diversify their factory locations to skirt U.S. tariffs and other trade restrictions. After Hanoi and Beijing normalized ties in the 1990s, inflows of Chinese investment began to pick up as Chinese firms in places like Bac Ninh tapped Vietnam’s electronics supply chain, labor force and supportive local governments, often aided by Chinese-speaking intermediaries who smooth paperwork and logistics.
But Vietnam is too small to replace China, whose economy is 40 times larger, as the world’s factory floor. To try to keep up, its leaders are building new infrastructure, including a highway to the Chinese border that has cut travel time by more than an hour. A railway will connect Hanoi to Haiphong — Vietnam’s largest seaport — and then the border town of Lao Cai.
On Dec. 19, Bac Ninh broke ground on the expansion of an industrial zone for high-tech manufacturing, including electronics, pharmaceuticals and clean energy. It’s part of a synchronized nationwide push in which Vietnam launched 234 major projects worth more than $129 billion just weeks before a pivotal National Party Congress in January, when leaders will decide the country’s political leadership and economic direction.
The China factor collides with reality
In Bac Ninh’s downtown, a convenience store bears the name Tmall, after Alibaba’s flagship online marketplace. Signs in Chinese advertise services for investors. Chinese–Vietnamese language schools have opened to help locals and Chinese to learn each others’ languages.
But as Chinese companies compete for the best labor and other resources, costs are rising for the “China plus one” strategy of moving factories out of China to other locations, for example, Apple’s shift into India.
“It is becoming difficult to recruit workers,” said Peng, who works at a telecoms equipment company that moved from China’s southern technology hub of Shenzhen. He gave only one name because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Labor costs have jumped 10%–15% since 2024, he said, “And we expect them to keep rising.”
Vietnam still need technology, equipment and expertise from China, which had created “the best manufacturing ecosystem,” said Jacob Rothman, co-founder and CEO of China-based Velong Enterprises, which makes grill tools and kitchen gadgets and has shifted some production to Southeast Asian countries including Cambodia and Vietnam.
Supply chains and manufacturers in China have benefited from decades of government support, large-scale investment and its huge population, Rothman said. “You can’t recreate that overnight.”
Brian Bourke, global chief commercial officer at U.S.-based SEKO Logistics, said while factories making footwear, furniture and technology are still relocating to Vietnam, it lags China in infrastructure and logistics capabilities.
Some of those limits are surfacing in boomtowns like Bac Ninh, where firms are trying to lure workers with higher wages and bonuses, a box of instant noodles on their first day and bus fares if they commute from another city, according to state media.
Vietnam faces competition from its neighbors
Few countries have benefitted more from Trump’s trade war than Vietnam, whose biggest export market is still the U.S. In 2024, Vietnam ran a $123.5 billion surplus with the U.S., the third largest behind China and Mexico. That irked Trump, who threatened a 46% import tax on Vietnamese goods before settling on 20%.
The two countries are still working toward a deal to keep most tariffs at 20%. Vietnam has offered broad preferential access for U.S. products, the White House said in October. So far, it has largely absorbed the tariffs, running a trade surplus of $121.6 billion in January-November 2025.
The agreement in October by Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to a year-long trade truce and lower average tariffs on Chinese exports to the U.S. to about 47% helped ease some concerns. But persisting uncertainty over tariffs and other trade restrictions means companies aren’t just trying to shift factories out of China but to spread them across several countries, said Frederic Neumann, chief Asia economist at HSBC.
Even with lower U.S. tariffs on China, the calculus still favors moving to Southeast Asia where manufacturing inefficiencies add only about 10% in cost. But while large corporations can shift production easily, smaller firms may struggle to fit a new factory with expensive equipment.
“(The) race to move outside of China is still happening, and it’s accelerating,” Rothman said.
Vietnam is still attracting ample foreign investment. Cumulative foreign investment topped $28.5 billion as of September, up 15% from last year. But scrutiny of Vietnam’s role as a hub for tariff-dodging transshipments has some manufacturers hedging their bets.
One of SEKO Logistics’ customers has shifted some of its furniture making to India, not wanting to “put all their eggs in Vietnam,” Bourke said.
Countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, which missed the early gains Vietnam captured, are promoting themselves as alternative manufacturing bases. In the Philippines, a new law allows foreign investors to lease private land for up to 99 years to attract long-term commercial and industrial investment.
Vietnam as a ‘tiger economy’
Vietnam has a goal of becoming rich by 2045. It aims to become Asia’s next “tiger economy,” following export powerhouses like South Korea and Taiwan by shifting from low-cost assembly work to manufacture higher-value products like electronics and clean energy equipment.
It’s offering incentives like tax breaks on imported machinery and discounted rents to help factory suppliers upgrade and modernize. About a third still use non-automated equipment and only about 10% use robots on their production lines.
The country also is trying to reduce its dependence on the U.S. market by expanding exports to the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and India. Overseas trade offices have been asked to share market intelligence and promote products made in Vietnam.
Vietnam knows that rising costs and tougher competition will test how far it — and places like Bac Ninh — can climb. Announcing hundreds of projects in December, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh framed the stakes: Vietnam must “reach far into the ocean, delve deep underground and soar high into space.”
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Chan reported from Hong Kong. Associated Press researcher Yu Bing in Beijing contributed.
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Dec 19, 2025Ravie LakshmananCybercrime / Law Enforcement
Authorities in Nigeria have announced the arrest of three “high-profile internet fraud suspects” who are alleged to have been involved in phishing attacks targeting major corporations, including the main developer behind the RaccoonO365 phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) scheme.
The Nigeria Police Force National Cybercrime Centre (NPF–NCCC) said investigations conducted in collaboration with Microsoft and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) led to the identification of Okitipi Samuel, also known as Moses Felix, as the principal suspect and developer of the phishing infrastructure.
“Investigations reveal that he operated a Telegram channel through which phishing links were sold in exchange for cryptocurrency and hosted fraudulent login portals on Cloudflare using stolen or fraudulently obtained email credentials,” the NPF said in a post shared on social media.
In addition, laptops, mobile devices, and other digital equipment linked to the operation have been seized following search operations conducted at their residences. The two other arrested individuals have no connection to the creation or operation of the PhaaS service, per the NPF. The arrests were carried out following raids in Lagos and Edo states.
RaccoonO365 is the name assigned to a financially motivated threat group behind a PhaaS toolkit that enables bad actors to conduct credential harvesting attacks by serving phishing pages mimicking Microsoft 365 login pages. Microsoft is tracking the threat actor under the moniker Storm-2246.
Back in September 2025, the tech giant said it worked with Cloudflare to seize 338 domains used by RaccoonO365. The phishing infrastructure attributed to the toolkit is estimated to have led to the theft of at least 5,000 Microsoft credentials from 94 countries since July 2024.
The NPF said RaccoonO365 was used to set up fraudulent Microsoft login portals aimed at stealing user credentials and using them to gain unlawful access to the email platforms of corporate, financial, and educational institutions. The joint probe has uncovered multiple incidents of unauthorized Microsoft 365 account access between January and September 2025 that originated from phishing messages crafted to mimic legitimate Microsoft authentication pages.
These activities led to business email compromise, data breaches, and financial losses across multiple jurisdictions, the NPF added.
A civil lawsuit filed by Microsoft and Health-ISAC in September has accused defendants Joshua Ogundipe and four other John Does of hosting a cybercriminal operation by “selling, distributing, purchasing, and implementing” the phishing kit to facilitate sophisticated spear-phishing and siphon sensitive information.
The stolen data is then used to fuel more cybercrimes, including business email compromise, financial fraud, and ransomware attacks, as well as commit intellectual property violations, the lawsuit alleged.
The lawsuit also identified Ogundipe as the mastermind behind the operation. His present whereabouts are unclear. When reached for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson told The Hacker News that investigations are ongoing.
The development comes as Google filed a lawsuit against the operators of the Darcula PhaaS service, naming Chinese national Yucheng Chang as the group’s leader along with 24 other members. The company is seeking a court order to seize the group’s server infrastructure that has been behind a massive smishing wave impersonating U.S. government entities.
Darcula and associates are estimated to have stolen nearly 900,000 credit card numbers, including nearly 40,000 from Americans, according to an investigation from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and cybersecurity company Mnemonic. The Chinese-language phishing kit first emerged in July 2023.
News of the lawsuit was first reported by NBC News on December 17, 2025. The development comes a little over a month after Google also sued China-based hackers associated with another PhaaS service known as Lighthouse that’s believed to have impacted over 1 million users across 120 countries.
A far-left activist group in Germany has claimed responsibility for a suspected arson attack that left tens of thousands of homes, as well as hospitals and businesses, without power in around-freezing temperatures.
The Vulkangruppe (Volcano Group) said in a statement that the fossil fuel economy, not cutting power, was the target of the action.
It will take until Thursday to reconnect power for all customers, with some schools due to be closed at the start of this week.
Early on Saturday, several cables on a bridge were spotted burning near a power plant in south-west Berlin. The fire was quickly put out, but around 45,000 households and 2,200 businesses were left without electricity.
The state economy minister told German media that incendiary devices had caused the damage.
Berlin’s mayor condemned the attack, accusing “suspected left-wing extremists” of knowingly endangering lives, especially those of patients in hospitals.
Hospitals and care facilities had received emergency power generators, officials said. The response had included transferring individuals from care sites and people requiring care in their own homes from the affected area to care facilities with reported available capacity.
Some hospitals had their electricity restored by Sunday.
As of Sunday afternoon, around 10,000 households and 300 businesses had been reconnected, with most still waiting to receive power back.
Some schools, which were due to reopen on Monday after the Christmas holidays, will remain closed.
The capital’s electricity operator said it would take until Thursday to reconnect all customers.
The Vulkangruppe in its statement apologised to less affluent residents impacted by the power cuts, but said it had less sympathy for “the many owners of villas”.
The statement said the attack on the gas-fired power plant was an “act of self-defence” and solidarity with those who protect the earth.
Police told AFP news agency they believed the statement was “plausible” while they continued to investigate, with other media reporting police thought it was credible.
The Vulkangruppe previously claimed responsibility for a suspected arson attack that halted production at Tesla’s Berlin car factory in 2024.
