Vietnam's Numbers Are All Hitting Records. Most of the Money Isn't Going to Vietnamese Companies
Vietnam's GDP, exports and stock market all hit records in 2025. But every dollar of export growth came from foreign firms, strip them out and Vietnam runs a trade deficit, and the stock rally came mostly from one conglomerate.
[Vietnam's Numbers Are All Hitting Records. Most of the Money Isn't Going to Vietnamese Companies]
A Samsung phone comes off the assembly line in Thái Nguyên province, north of Hanoi, and is loaded onto a ship. Customs records the full price of the phone. More than half of Samsung's smartphones worldwide are made in Vietnam, and the revenue of its four main Vietnamese plants alone equals about 13% of the country's total exports. That phone is counted in Vietnam's record exports last year, and in its 8% GDP growth.
Almost every headline number out of Vietnam last year was a record. GDP grew 8%. Exports hit an all-time high. The stock market rose about 40%. GDP per capita is ten times what it was forty years ago. All of those numbers are real. But follow that phone backwards and ask what Vietnam actually made and what it actually earned, and the numbers mean something very different.
Start with who made it. Nearly 80% of Vietnam's exports last year came from foreign-invested companies, whose shipments grew by more than a quarter. Exports by Vietnamese-owned companies fell 6.1%. Every dollar of the country's export growth came from the foreign sector.
