O.C. Vietnamese Becoming Links to Emerging Deals : Trade: U.S. companies are turning to business people here with family ties and connections to the Southeast Asian nation.

WESTMINSTER —  Orange County’s large Vietnamese American community, in helping to expand commerce with Vietnam, is becoming a brokerage center--forging deals between their home country and American companies looking to trade there.

To locate scarce Vietnamese buyers, many U.S. companies are turning to Vietnamese American business people with family ties and connections in Vietnam to serve as their representatives.

Familiarity with Vietnam’s language and customs are particularly important for forging lasting ties in that nation, said Young Huynh, executive director of Irvine-based CJY Trading Inc. Without reliable telephone and mail services, much business is conducted in face-to-face meetings, he said.

Huynh, who recently became a distributor for Sunbeam-Oster Co.’s household appliances and for another company’s hardware division, met with officials during a trip to Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang last spring.

Though he had previously worked as a computer reseller in Irvine, Huynh said he didn’t think that many in Vietnam--where the annual household income is less than $300--would be able to afford the $1,000 machines. “You have to pick the right products to sell,” he said. “Maybe in a year people will start looking for computers.”

Officials with other Vietnamese American companies tell similar stories of how they have sold equipment, brokered sales, or became agents for large American corporations in the months since the Clinton Administration in February lifted the trade embargo with Vietnam.

The rise of trade ties comes despite some opposition from community leaders in Orange County, who argue that a continued economic embargo would have pushed the Vietnamese government to respect human rights.

The more that trade helps the Vietnamese economy, the less incentive there is for the government to hold clean, multi-party elections, said Bui Binh Ban, president of the Vietnamese Community of Southern California, a social services organization based in Westminster.

“Whoever helps them (the government) to survive is against our community,” said Ban. He said he had hoped trade with Vietnam would not develop as has American trade with China, which has been criticized by some here as lacking respect for human rights.

From January through June, U.S. exports to Vietnam were $29.6 million, compared to $7 million for all of 1993 (when some humanitarian goods were allowed to be shipped), according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Imports from Vietnam for the first six months of this year were $10.5 million, up from no imports in 1993.

Commerce Department officials said they didn’t know how much of that money flows through Orange County but that they receive a steady stream of inquires from the Little Saigon business district along Bolsa Avenue, between Ward and Magnolia streets.

The 1990 U.S. Census counted 70,500 Vietnamese in Orange County, making it the largest concentration outside of Vietnam. The Little Saigon area of Westminster is the main shopping district, but the local Vietnamese American population and its businesses are spread throughout the county.

Though many local Vietnamese had ties to the South Vietnamese government and are skeptical of doing business there now, their children--some of whom don’t remember much of the war--are putting the most effort into establishing trade ties, said Xuan Nhi Ho, president of Vietnam Investment and Trade Opportunity Project Inc. in Stanton.

Ho said he expects trade with Vietnam may come to resemble the deals he already arranges elsewhere in Asia, such as importing coffee and rice for American companies.

While U.S. companies currently lack the distribution channels set up by their Asian and European rivalS, which have been doing business in Vietnam for years, Ho said Vietnamese consumers tend to recognize American brand names. The recognition dates from the years of U.S. military involvement and from the American products previously sold there--despite the trade ban--through third-country middlemen, he said.

With many government-owned businesses lacking solid track records in financial management, however, Ho said he often has difficulty persuading U.S. banks to loan entrepreneurs the funds needed to make such trades.

“People want to see American (products) . . . but it’s hard to find the financial backing,” Ho said.

Bart Chapman, who is president and chief executive of Health Trade International in Mission Viejo, said he hoped American banks and government agencies would offer softer terms on loans to better compete with favorable financing arrangements made by Japanese and Korean competitors. “It might be expensive, but it would be worth it,” Chapman said. “I talk to business people and I ask them, ‘If you could have been in Japan in the 1950s, knowing what you know now, would you have done it?’ That’s the comparison.”

With an estimated population of 71.8 million, many expect that development in Vietnam will increase demand for foreign products, such as agricultural and manufacturing equipment, as well as for professional services.

Gordon Pfeiffer, a Pasadena attorney and business consultant who has spent three months in Vietnam so far this year, said those interested in brokering deals will find that the Vietnamese government wants to discourage short-term arrangements.

“If you’re just trying to put together a few deals and make some commissions, that’s not the way to go. You’re going to have trouble,” he said.

Not all the interest in Vietnam is from brokers, however. EPG International in Anaheim recently sold $25,000 worth of the water-filtering equipment it manufactures to the city of Hanoi and expects to sell more soon. The company also exports more than $500,000 in goods to Indonesia, Hong Kong and Thailand, said Philip Nguyen, an EPG vice president.

Nguyen, who visited Hanoi in April to attend a trade show organized by Orange County backers, said the sale began with government contacts he made through friends.

(Another mission, sponsored by the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce and the Asian Business League of California, is planned for later this year.)

EPG has several competitors in the United States that don’t have such good Vietnamese contacts, he said, and therefore aren’t yet a presence. “We think that we have the product and the price to beat them,” he said.

Kim-Yen Huynh, an assistant manager of Cathay Bank’s Westminster office in Little Saigon, said that she has received a steady stream of inquiries from area residents since the embargo was lifted.

“The majority of them want to be brokers, the middle person,” she said. “They still want to go to manufacturers here . . . but they’ll be the ones who would go back and forth” to Vietnam to make the sales.

Though many of Orange County’s Vietnamese American business people are anxious to begin trade with Vietnam, Huynh said she respects the views of those who are anti-communist. She said she does not expect the issue will divide the community.

“The majority of people I do business with are in favor of going back to Vietnam, of helping our country. But you can’t forget the people who are against” the opening of trade, she said.

Times research librarian Kathy McLaughlin contributed to this report.