Vietnam

Trade

Vietnam is amazingly one of the most vigorous economies in the region, showing positively dramatic growth in its exports and imports for almost ten years already, except for 2009. Exports and imports had been showing very negligible difference, since 2012 at US$ 114.5 billion and US$ 113.8 billion, respectively until 2015 at US$ 162.0 billion and US$ 165.8 billion, respectively.

3,688 products were exported to 143 market destinations, including US (20.7 percent) as the largest destination, China (10.2 percent), Japan (8.7 percent), Republic of Korea (5.5 percent), and Hong Kong (4.3 percent). Imports were composed of 4,381 products from 138 sources, especially from China (29.8 percent), followed by Republic of Korea (16.6 percent), Japan (8.6 percent), other Asia (6.6 percent), and Thailand (5.0 percent).

Vietnams main exports were consumer goods (40.9 percent) and capital goods (34.7 percent), while it exported relatively lower intermediate goods (12.8 percent) and raw materials (11.2 percent). It imported capital goods (41.8 percent) and intermediate goods (34.2 percent) more than consumer goods (15.9 percent) and raw materials (7.6 percent).

Most exports were machineries and electronics (35.4 percent), followed by textiles and clothing (16.8 percent), footwear (7.9 percent), vegetable (7.5 percent), miscellaneous (6.7 percent), metals (3.5 percent), animal (3.2 percent), plastic or rubber (3.2 percent), fuels (3.1 percent), food products (2.9 percent), hides and skins (2.0 percent), wood (2.0 percent), transportation (1.9 percent), chemicals (1.6 percent), and stone and glass (1.5 percent). Imports, on the other hand, were also mostly composed of machineries and electronics (37.9 percent), and small portions of metals (11.3 percent), textiles and clothing (9.3 percent), chemicals (7.4 percent), plastic or rubber (7.0 percent), fuels (4.8 percent), transportation (4.3 percent), vegetable (3.9 percent), miscellaneous (3.6 percent), food products (3.2 percent), wood (2.7 percent), animal (1.6 percent), and hides and skins (1.3 percent), stone and glass (1.1 percent).

Investment

FDI inflows of Vietnam increase from US$ 12.6 billion in 2016 to US$ 14,1 billion in 2017. The FDI stock stood at US$ 115.4 billion in 2016 to 129.5 billion in 2017.

From light industry, FDI inflows are turning into heavy industry, real estate, and tourism. Vietnam now produces high value-added products such as smart phones and tablets with the shift in FDI, which were mainly coming from Korea, Japan, and Singapore.

The country is positioned to attract more FDI in Asia and is expected to realize increasing inflows.

References:

https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/VNM/Year/2015/Summary (Accessed on 31 October 2018)

https://en.portal.santandertrade.com/establish-overseas/vietnam/investing (Accessed on 31 October 2018)