Politburo member and Secretary of the Ho Chi Minh City Party Committee Nguyen Thien Nhan (R) meets with received Senior Vice President of the US-ASEAN Business Council Michael Michalak on June 17

At the meeting, the host highly valued efforts by Michalak, who is also a former US ambassador to Vietnam, to help promote bilateral relations in a result-oriented manner.

He noted that on the basis of the two countries’ sound relations, partnership between HCM City and the US has also reaped good outcomes, especially in trade, investment and education.

Nhan asked the UABC Vice President to continue helping US businesses to learn about the local investment climate, and invest in HCM City’s prioritized fields such as smart city building, scientific-technological development and innovation, thereby contributing to the substantive cooperation between the countries.

For his part, Michalak voiced his delight at the US’s growing relations with Vietnam, noting that over the past 10 years, more than 80,000 Vietnamese students have enrolled in secondary schools and higher educational institutions in the US.

There are over 30,000 Vietnamese students in his country at present, ranking first among Southeast Asian countries and fifth in the world in terms of the foreign student sources in the US, he noted.

He also asked HCM City’s authorities to continue favourable conditions for US firms to invest in different areas, especially in education, training and human resources quality improvement.

At the event, the two sides discussed ways to step up cooperation programmes and projects on training high-quality human resources.

The US is now a leading trade partner of HCM City as bilateral trade reached 8.2 billion USD in 2018. With nearly 400 projects worth almost 1 billion USD, it ranks 10th among countries and territories investing in the city.-VNA