AMHERST, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 20, 2025--
OrthoLite®, the global leader of branded, high-performance, comfort footwear solutions, announces that OrthoLite Vietnam (OVN) has been awarded Best Companies to Work for in Asia by HR Asia for the second consecutive year. The award was presented during a ceremony in Ho Chi Minh City on August 14, 2025.
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Organized and presented by HR Asia, the Best Companies to Work for in Asia Awards evaluates and honors organizations with best practices in human resources, high levels of employee engagement and excellent workplace cultures.
OrthoLite Vietnam (OVN) successfully completed multiple rigorous assessments conducted across all levels of company leadership, exceeding the comprehensive criteria required to achieve the highest distinction—first place. HR Asia's evaluation further highlighted OrthoLite Vietnam’s outstanding performance, with scores significantly surpassing the market average.
“We couldn’t be prouder of our exceptional team and leadership in Vietnam,” said Glenn Barrett, founder and CEO of OrthoLite. “Their unwavering dedication, proactive mindset, and strong spirit of collaboration are a direct reflection of the unique culture we've built—one that is integral to our success. It’s this culture that empowers our teams to consistently deliver the highest quality insole solutions to our global brand partners every day.”
The OVN team comprises over 1,000 employees who work in OrthoLite’s state-of-the-art facility in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. OVN’s automation, growing lean lines and attention to the company’s best manufacturing for less-impactful manufacturing, combine to make it a leading manufacturing facility for OrthoLite.
“We are truly honored to receive this award for the second year in a row and to be recognized for the strength of our incredible team and company culture,” said Mark Coffield, Country Manager for OrthoLite Vietnam. “Our exceptional team has a collaborative spirit and dedication that are unmatched and are at the heart of every partnership we build with OrthoLite brand partners.”
OVN is one of six vertically-integrated global manufacturing facilities owned by OrthoLite, all of which work together to bring an unmatched level of consistency, transparency and best practices to the brand’s 550-plus global brand partners.
Recently OVN’s Higg Index score was released, which showed the facility and team achieved an overall verified score of 90-percent.
“This is all due to the exceptional leadership and dedication of Jenny Le, Human Resource Director at OVN, who has led our HR program for over six years,” Coffield noted. “It’s also due to our dedicated OVN team, who work daily toward our goal of achieving sustainability through environmental management, energy, water use, wastewater management, waste management, air quality and chemical management.”
For additional information on OrthoLite, please visit ortholite.com.
About OrthoLite®
OrthoLite is the world’s leading supplier of open-cell foam technology found in more than 550 footwear brands across all categories of footwear and is the first name in comfort and performance foams. OrthoLite has a stalwart commitment to an ongoing journey toward producing excellence with less-impactful manufacturing practices. The company also has a long-standing history of meaningful partnerships and sponsorships that demonstrate a dedicated commitment to supporting its customers, consumers, brand partners and the footwear industry. OrthoLite is the Official Insole sponsor of the New York Yankees, supporter of Textile Exchange, and is a founding supporter of the Two Ten Foundation. Stay up to date with company news by visiting OrthoLite.com and following OrthoLite on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. To learn more about the benefits of OrthoLite, visit www.ortholite.com.
Mark Coffield, Country Manager for OrthoLite Vietnam
WASHINGTON (AP) — A bipartisan group of lawmakers have proposed creating a new agency with $2.5 billion to spur production of rare earths and the other critical minerals, while the Trump administration has already taken aggressive actions to break China's grip on the market for these materials that are crucial to high-tech products, including cellphones, electric vehicles, jet fighters and missiles.
It’s too early to tell how the bill, if passed, could align with the White House’s policy, but whatever the approach, the U.S. is in a crunch to drastically reduce its reliance on China, after Beijing used its dominance of the critical minerals market to gain leverage in the trade war with Washington. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to a one-year truce in October, by which Beijing would continue to export critical minerals while the U.S. would ease its export controls of U.S. technology on China.
The Pentagon has shelled out nearly $5 billion over the past year to help ensure its access to the materials after the trade war laid bare just how beholden the U.S. is to China, which processes more than 90% of the world's critical minerals. To break Beijing's chokehold, the U.S. government is taking equity stakes in a handful of critical mineral companies and in some cases guaranteeing the price of some commodities using an approach that seems more likely to come out of China's playbook instead of a Republican administration.
The bill that Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., introduced Thursday would favor a more market-based approach by setting up the independent body charged with building a stockpile of critical minerals and related products, stabilizing prices, and encouraging domestic and allied production to help ensure stable supply not only for the military but also the broader economy and manufacturers.
Shaheen called the legislation “a historic investment” to make the U.S. economy more resilient against China’s dominance that she said has left the U.S. vulnerable to economic coercion. Young said creating the new reserve is “a much-needed, aggressive step to protect our national and economic security.”
Rep. Rob Wittman, R.-Va., introduced the House version of the bill.
When Trump imposed widespread tariffs last spring, Beijing fought back not only with tit-for-tat tariffs but severe restrictions on the export of critical minerals, forcing Washington to back down and eventually agree to the truce when the leaders met in South Korea.
On Monday, in his speech at SpaceX, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed that the Pentagon has in the past five months alone “deployed over $4.5 billion in capital commitments” to close six critical minerals deals that will “help free the United States from market manipulation.”
One of the deals involves a $150 million of preferred equity by the Pentagon in Atlantic Alumina Co. to save the country's last alumina refinery and build its first large-scale gallium production facility in Louisiana.
Last year, the Pentagon announced it would buy $400 million of preferred stock in MP Materials, which owns the country's only operational rare earths mine at Mountain Pass, California, and entered into a $1.4-billion joint partnership with ReElement Technologies Corp. to build up a domestic supply chain for rare earth magnets.
On Wednesday, Trump announced in a proclamation that the U.S. is “too reliant” on foreign-sourced critical minerals and directed his administration to negotiate better deals. He said possible remedies would include minimum import prices for certain critical minerals.
“Reshoring manufacturing that’s critical to our national and economic security is a top priority for the Trump administration,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson.
The drastic move by the U.S. government to take equity stakes has prompted some analysts to observe that Washington is pivoting to some form of state capitalism to compete with Beijing.
“Despite the dangers of political interference, the strategic logic is compelling,” wrote Elly Rostoum, a senior fellow at the Washington-based research institute Center for European Policy Analysis. She suggested that the new model could be “a prudent way for the U.S. to ensure strategic autonomy and industrial sovereignty.”
Companies across the industry are welcoming the intervention from Trump's administration.
“He is playing three-dimensional chess on critical minerals like no previous president has done. It's about time too, given the military and strategic vulnerability we face by having to import so many of these fundamental building blocks of technology and national defense,” NioCorp's Chief Communications Officer Jim Sims said. That company is trying to finish raising the money it needs to build a mine in southeast Nebraska.
In addition to trying to boost domestic production, the Trump administration has sought to secure some of these crucial elements through allies. In October, Trump signed an $8.5 billion agreement with Australia to invest in mining there, and the president is now aggressively trying to take over Greenland in the hope of being able to one day extract rare earths from there.
On Monday, finance ministers from the G7 nations huddled in Washington over their vulnerability in the critical mineral supply chains.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has led several rounds of trade negotiations with Beijing, urged attendees to increase their supply chain resiliency and thanked them for their willingness to work together “toward decisive action and lasting solutions,” according to a Treasury statement.
The bill introduced on Thursday by Shaheen and Young would encourage production with both domestic and allied producers.
Congress in the past several years has pushed for legislation to protect the U.S. military and civilian industry from Beijing's chokehold. The issue became a pressing concern every time China turned to its proven tactics of either restricting the supply or turned to dumping extra critical minerals on the market to depress prices and drive any potential competitors out of business.
The Biden administration sought to increase demand for critical minerals domestically by pushing for more electric vehicle and windmill production. But the Trump administration largely eliminated the incentives for those products and instead chose to focus on increasing critical minerals production directly.
Most of those past efforts were on a much more limited scale than what the government has done in the past year, and they were largely abandoned after China relented and eased access to critical minerals.
Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska. AP writer Konstantin Toropin contributed to the report.
FILE - NioCorp Chief Operating Officer Scott Honan tells a group of investors about the plans for a proposed mine during a tour of the site Oct. 6, 2021, near Elk Creek in southeast Nebraska. (AP Photo/Josh Funk, File)
FILE - President Donald Trump, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, shake hands before their meeting at Gimhae International Airport in Busan, South Korea, Oct. 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
FILE - Workers use machinery to dig at a rare earth mine in Ganxian county in central China's Jiangxi province on Dec. 30, 2010. (Chinatopix via AP, File)
