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Headlines:
Foreign Exit, FTSE Entrance
Bombs Over Tehran, Workers Frozen
Cold War Chip Ban, Lifted
Highlands Coffee Brews a Listing
Vuong's $20 Billion Ride
Seven Years of Yellow, the Final Inspection
Factory Floor Says What Harvard Already Knew
Hospital Bills Come Due
Samsung Rakes In a Tenth of Global Profit
VinFast's Million-Scooter Moonshot
Hanoi Tells Gas-Burning Cabs: You've Got Five Years
Barcoded Trees, Tariffed Furniture
Foreign Exit, FTSE Entrance
$5.1 billion exited the Vietnamese stock market through 2025, a record exodus in the same year that the benchmark index climbed 41% for its strongest gain in eight years. FTSE Russell is now closing in on reclassifying the market to Secondary Growing status (that should happen in September). The outflows continued into early 2026, dropping foreign ownership to roughly 14.5% of a $332 billion market, with investors pointing to Trump tariff risks, ownership caps that make deeper positions untenable, and Vingroup's outsized pull on index performance. Vietcap Securities puts the odds of failing FTSE's March review at "zero chance" after regulators issued Circular 08 in February, letting foreign funds place orders through global brokers without opening local accounts. The upgrade would slot the market at 0.34% of FTSE's all-cap index, modest but enough to pull in passive inflows from pension funds and ETFs that are required to track the benchmark.
Read more: Reuters, Vietnaminsiders, Theinvestor (28 stocks list), Eneconomy (credit rating push)
Bombs Over Tehran, Workers Frozen
Hanoi suspended labor deployments to the Middle East on March 1 after the February 28 U.S.-Israeli offensive killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and set off retaliatory strikes across the region. Around 10,000 workers are already there, nearly 6,000 in Saudi Arabia, and about 4,000 in the UAE, with a handful more in Qatar and Bahrain, mostly in domestic service, hospitality, and construction. The Department of Overseas Labor Management told recruitment agencies to keep in contact with employers and embassies but gave no timeline about when deployments might restart, saying only it would wait until "the situation returns to normal." Foreign Ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang said the attacks threaten citizens in the region, though diplomatic missions have reported no casualties or damage to date.
Read more: VnExpress, Theinvestor (economic stability concerns), VnExpress (worker deployment suspension)
Cold War Chip Ban, Lifted
On February 20, President Trump removed Vietnam from the U.S. strategic export control list where it had sat since the Cold War alongside China, Russia, and North Korea, clearing the way to buy advanced chipmaking equipment from American companies. That same day, party chief To Lam landed in Washington to ink the deal, having broken ground five weeks earlier on Viettel's first domestically owned chip fabrication plant in Hanoi. The facility will make 32-nanometer chips, the kind that run cars and telecom networks, not the bleeding-edge 2- or 3-nanometer chips that dominate headlines but need far more capital and expertise. Days before flying to Washington, Lam's government held back-to-back meetings with ASML, the Dutch maker of advanced chip equipment that Washington has pressured the Netherlands to stop selling to China, to talk about a training center and an official company presence. Vietnam has about 7,000 chip engineers right now and the target is 50,000 by 2030, a gap that a new law is trying to close by exempting high-quality tech workers from needing work permits and offering five-year visas that also cover spouses and children.
Read more: Restofworld, Eneconomy (talent incentives policy)
Highlands Coffee Brews a Listing
Jollibee's coffee chain Highlands Coffee is looking at an IPO on the Hanoi bourse, with a listing hoped for in the first quarter of 2027. The brand has grown from 56 stores when Jollibee bought it in 2012 to nearly 1,000 outlets today, making it the largest coffee chain in the country. No Vietnamese coffee chain has ever gone public, and the company hasn't shared a target valuation. A successful listing would be the biggest test yet of whether Hanoi's exchange can hold institutional interest beyond the usual bank and property names.
Read more: Reuters (dual listing strategy), Business Inquirer
Vuong's $20 Billion Ride
Pham Nhat Vuong merged his ride-hailing unit GSM with electric vehicle rental outfit Green Future, creating a combined entity with $1.6 billion in charter capital that could list on a foreign exchange as soon as 2027 at a reported $20 billion valuation (that would be roughly a third of Grab's current market cap). GSM already claims more than half the domestic ride-hailing market three years post-launch and also runs in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Laos. Green Future leads the EV rental and used car business. The combined company is expected to bundle delivery, electric motorbike hailing, and electric bus services under one roof.
Read more: Vietnam Investment Review
Seven Years of Yellow, the Final Inspection
The European Commission's fifth inspection team will land on March 9 to decide whether to lift the yellow card that was imposed on seafood exports in October 2017 OR to escalate the penalty to a red card that would shut wild-caught fish out of the EU entirely. Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh hosted a meeting Monday to prepare, while Deputy Prime Minister Tran Hong Ha sent a telegram telling ministries to sync vessel databases, chase criminal IUU cases, and make sure no boats with disconnected monitoring systems leave port. More than 80,000 fishing vessels have been registered on the VNFishbase system, and officials reported no new foreign water violations in recent weeks. Chinh struck a personal note: "Do not let the mistake of an individual or a group affect the collective effort of the entire country."
Read more: Seafoodsource (red card impact), Eneconomy (vessel registration numbers)
Factory Floor Says What Harvard Already Knew
Manufacturing PMI hit 54.3 in February, up from 51.9 in January, a four-month high, with output climbing at the fastest clip since July 2024. Business confidence reached a 41-month peak as firms ramped up hiring and stockpiling inputs. Harvard's Growth Lab ranked the country as the world's top growth prospect through 2035, pointing to manufacturing complexity well above what its income level would predict.
Read more: Eneconomy (PMI methodology details), VnExpress (Harvard growth forecast)
Hospital Bills Come Due
Former Health Minister Nguyen Thi Kim Tien, 67, faces prosecution for violations that caused $2.68 million in direct losses across two hospital construction projects. Investigators say Tien approved hiring foreign consultants for the Bach Mai Hospital and Viet Duc University Hospital expansions without Prime Minister clearance, then signed off on architectural plans and contractor appointments that violated procurement regulations. Six other officials are also caught up in the case, including two project directors that are facing both graft and bribery charges.
Read more: VnExpress
Samsung Rakes In a Tenth of Global Profit
Samsung's four subsidiaries raked in $3.53 billion in net profit last year, roughly a tenth of the electronics giant's global haul. Combined sales hit $59.7 billion between the Thai Nguyen and Ho Chi Minh City plants, the display facility, and the consumer electronics complex, an 8% increase from a year earlier. That is a quarter of Samsung Electronics' worldwide revenue flowing through a single production base. Profit grew 12%, a decent read on global electronics appetite given that Samsung has sunk $23.2 billion here to date, a sprawling bet that local manufacturing can handle both volume and complexity at the high end of the value chain.
Read more: Businesskorea Kr
VinFast's Million-Scooter Moonshot
VinFast got the green light from Ha Tinh province for a $506 million electric scooter and e-bike plant in the Vung Ang Economic Zone, with approval landing on February 28. The facility is expected to pump out a million units per year once Phase 1 wraps up, and Phase 2 should double the plant’s capacity. VinFast says it will finish investment procedures and break ground before the end of Q1, and start mass production by Q2, a timeline that would be ambitious for a lunch order, let alone a factory of this scale.
Read more: Eneconomy
Hanoi Tells Gas-Burning Cabs: You've Got Five Years
The capital plans to convert all 14,300 gasoline and diesel taxis to electric by 2030; nearly 8,800 are already running on batteries. The city is offering subsidized loans, has waived registration fees, and has set preferential parking rates to get to almost two-thirds conversion by the end of this year.
Read more: Eneconomy
Barcoded Trees, Tariffed Furniture
Wood exports totaled $18.5 billion in 2025, up almost 7% over 2024, even though Washington put a 25% duty on kitchen cabinets and upholstered furniture last October. Wooden furniture still accounts for $10.25 billion of that total; the US bought $9.46 billion worth of wood and wooden products overall, or more than half the industry's export turnover. The next play is for the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment to build a nationwide plantation forest coding system that’s designed to prove timber legality and fend off dumping and circumvention complaints before they metastasize. The system will tag every plantation tree in the country with a barcode in response to anti-dumping duties, countervailing duties, and Section 232 probes that are already pressuring plywood and furniture.
Read more: Eneconomy
That's all for this week, thanks for reading. Your voice matters to us. Feel we're missing something? Have additional sources to suggest? Don't hold back- hit reply and tell us what you think.
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