Earlier this month, our Singapore and Hanoi teams traveled to Ho Chi Minh City for Emerging Vietnam 2026, the 12th annual investment conference hosted by Ho Chi Minh City Securities Corporation (HSC). Across two days, we sat in on macro and sector panels, met management teams from across our coverage, and spoke with industry experts and policymakers. We also joined field visits to several development and industrial sites, which gave us a closer read on how Vietnam's structural changes are progressing on the ground rather than only in the data.
This article opens a short series on what we took away from the conference, starting with Vietnam’s macro picture: how fast the economy is likely to grow, and the shift in its growth model that policymakers and analysts increasingly point to as the country looks toward 2030.
The Vietnamese government previously set a target of double-digit GDP growth for 2026–2030, a goal it describes as a strategic priority to mobilize reform and investment at the pace needed to reach upper-middle-income status. Among panelists at the conference, the consensus was that 10%+ growth each year is not a realistic base case, with most external projections clustering around 7%, including the IMF's forecast for 2026. In comparison, average growth of 4.1% was estimated for the ASEAN-5 (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand).
Panelists noted that the double-digit target is best taken as a strategic anchor rather than a growth forecast. The Vietnamese government has historically used ambitious growth targets to maintain reform momentum and public investment spending, and the current target follows that pattern. Vietnam's recent track record gives the target credibility: the country ended 2025 with GDP growth of 8.0%, its strongest pace in a decade according to the National Statistics Office, and has outperformed most regional economies consistently over the past five years.
The more consequential question is not whether Vietnam hits 10%, but how it intends to grow with that target in mind. Vietnam's expansion over the past two decades leaned heavily on capital investment, a growing workforce, and foreign-invested assembly, while productivity lagged. HSC pointed to total factor productivity contributing roughly -0.3% to growth over recent years, against about 2.0% for emerging markets as a whole. The next phase is meant to change that mix, toward a private-sector-led, higher-productivity, more innovation-driven economy. Getting there also means lifting investment from around 33% of GDP toward 40%, with private capital and FDI doing most of the heavy lifting rather than the state.
Two priorities stood out as central to this shift, and are the focus of the rest of this article: reform and infrastructure. Policy reforms make doing business cheaper, faster, and more predictable. They tend to favor larger, listed companies, as stricter rules raise costs that smaller, informal businesses struggle to absorb. Infrastructure development helps in a different way, by lowering logistics costs and giving companies access to more customers. Tangible infrastructure progress can also support consumer confidence and a shift from saving to spending, a particularly meaningful driver in a domestic-demand economy like Vietnam's. Together, these two factors make it more appealing for companies to invest and easier for them to grow. This concentrates profit growth in established, well-run businesses, the ones best positioned to capture market share as the economy formalizes.
If private businesses are to drive the next phase of growth, they need a lower-friction, more predictable environment to operate in, and this is where Vietnam has moved fastest. Panelists described the current institutional overhaul as the country's most significant in more than two decades, with an unusually large scope and tight timeline. Since July 2025, the number of provinces was cut from 63 to 34 and the district tier removed, creating a leaner two-tier structure of provinces and communes. where a total of 741 administrative procedures were streamlined to the local level to speed up permits and approvals.
Legislation has also kept pace with the administrative changes. The National Assembly passed 89 laws in 2025, more than five times the prior average, while nearly two-thirds of business procedures were simplified or scrapped, according to figures from the Government Office and the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI). VCCI estimates these simplifications cut annual compliance costs by roughly VND 48.6 trillion (nearly USD 1.9 billion), a reduction of about 40%. For a company deciding whether to invest in Vietnam, lower compliance burdens and faster approvals translate directly into better project economics.
Among recent policy changes, Resolutions 68 and 79 best reflected the government's direction. Resolution 68 strengthens legal protection for private businesses, formally names the private sector as the most important driver of the economy, and sets a target of 2 million enterprises by 2030. Resolution 79 turns to state-owned enterprises (SOEs), pressing for greater autonomy, fairer competition with private firms, and a sharper focus on strategic sectors. Taken together, these resolutions signal a shift in how capital is allocated in the economy, away from state direction and toward private initiative. This is one of the foundations Vietnam’s new economic growth model depends on: a private sector with the legal certainty and operational capacity to invest at the scale the targets require.
Vietnam's infrastructure deficit is one of the most direct drags on productivity, and closing it is central to the new growth model. According to The World Bank and HSC Research, the country’s logistics costs run at about 17% of GDP, against roughly 11% in developed economies and a government target of 12–15%. Its expressway and railway networks remain thin for an economy of its size: around 2,268 km of expressways today, and a rail network that trails regional peers on both length and density. Those gaps raise the cost of moving goods, limit how far regional markets integrate, and weigh on the manufacturing competitiveness that still anchors Vietnam’s export base. Addressing these infrastructure gaps is a national priority, allowing Vietnam to shift from input-driven to productivity-driven growth.
This development priority is backed with Vietnam’s most ambitious public investment program to date. According to the Ministry of Finance, the medium-term plan for 2026–2030 totals VND 8.2 quadrillion (approximately USD 313 billion). The 2026 allocation alone stands at around USD 42 billion, up 22.2% year-over-year, building on 2025 disbursement of USD 33.7 billion, which reached 98% of last year’s plan. On the ground, this translates into a target of 5,000 km of expressways by 2030, more than double the current network, and approximately 9,200 km by 2050."
Vietnam’s flagship project is the USD 67.3 billion North–South High-Speed Railway, a 1,541 km line designed for 350 km/h and to cut travel between its two largest cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, to under six hours. Alongside it are metro systems in both cities, the Lao Cai–Hanoi–Hai Phong railway, and Ring Road 4 in the Ho Chi Minh City region, part of a railway pipeline HSC estimates at around USD 150 billion through 2050. Much of this is expected to be funded through a mix of public money, public-private partnerships (PPPs), and transit-oriented development (TOD), where rising land and property values around new stations help pay for the lines themselves. Apartment prices along Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City's first metro routes have already climbed as those lines came into service, an early sign of the value such projects can unlock, and of why private capital, not just public budgets, is central to making the growth model work.
The key takeaway from the macro session at the conference is that Vietnam's reform and infrastructure agenda is further along than market pricing suggests. The changes enacted since 2025 are not incremental adjustments – they represent a meaningful shift in how the economy is governed and how capital is expected to be allocated. Whether that translates into earnings and valuation re-rating depends on delivery, and that is what we continue to track: disbursement rates on major projects, the durability of regulatory changes at the implementation level, and whether higher-value industries gain real traction.
One question that surfaced consistently across sessions is how Vietnam finances the scale of infrastructure investment it requires. Public debt at 34–35% of GDP, well below the statutory ceiling of 60%, leaves room for further fiscal expansion, but state budgets alone cannot carry a program of this size. Therefore, private capital and FDI need to scale up significantly, and that depends on Vietnam's financial system becoming better equipped to mobilize and direct long-term funding via capital markets. This is a theme we will return to later in the Emerging Vietnam series.
The Kenno Vietnam Fund invests in fundamentally sound Vietnamese companies at attractive valuations that reflect their long-term earnings potential. In the context of Vietnam's evolving growth model, we look for businesses positioned to benefit from the formalization of the economy, stronger governance, and the durable domestic demand that reform and infrastructure are set to support. If you would like to learn more about the fund or our investment approach, feel free to reach out. For more from Emerging Vietnam 2026, including a closer look at Vietnam's capital markets and key sectors, stay tuned for upcoming articles in this series in our blog section.