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Asian AngleVietnam’s economic miracle has a made-elsewhere problem
The numbers dazzle, but Vietnamese companies are losing ground in their own export boom as the middle-income trap looms
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By most economic measures, Vietnam had a spectacular 2025. The economy grew 8.02 per cent, its fastest pace since 2011, even as a 20 per cent US tariff landed on its goods and Typhoon Kalmaegi tore through its coastline.
Total trade exceeded US$930 billion. Exports to the United States jumped 28 per cent to more than US$150 billion, handing Hanoi its largest-ever trade surplus with Washington. Foreign investors poured in record sums. Draft a prospectus for the next Asian miracle and Vietnam in 2025 would be the cover story.
The government certainly thinks so. Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh has set a target of at least 10 per cent annual growth from 2026 to 2030, backed by an estimated US$200 billion in new, large-scale projects. It’s the kind of ambition that echoes South Korea in the 1970s or China in the early 2000s, and it’s not entirely fanciful: Vietnam has averaged roughly 7 per cent growth since the 1990s, second only to China over that period.
A closer look at last year’s numbers, though, reveals a more complicated story. Vietnam’s boom is real, yet a striking share of it belongs to someone else. Start with who is doing the exporting. Foreign-invested enterprises accounted for 77.3 per cent of Vietnam’s exports last year, with shipments growing 26.1 per cent. Domestic firms, by contrast, saw their exports fall 6.1 per cent.
In other words, in the middle of the greatest export boom in the country’s history, home-grown companies’ shipments were shrinking.
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