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Headlines:
Hanoi Goes to DEFCON Fuel
The Airport Boss Grounded Over Graft
Factory Floor Gold Rush
Seoul's Chip Shop Sets Up in Saigon
POSCO Bets Big on Battery Brains
Hanoi's Laos Insurance Policy
Dress Rehearsal for FTSE
Hanoi Lets Multinationals Drop the Dong
More Rice, Less Money
Banks Lead the Bounce
Highlands Coffee Eyes a Listing With Its Latte
From Moscow With Luggage
Hanoi Goes to DEFCON Fuel
Vietnam has thrown everything short of rationing at a Middle East-driven energy crisis this week, authorizing state oil giant PVN to buy and import crude independently for the first time, cutting fuel import tariffs to zero through April 30, and telling ministries to diversify supply sources by a deadline of today. Domestic prices have gone up by between about 20 or 30% since late February, with diesel now VND30,239/ liter. Transport operators have already started to pass costs through, with logistics firms adding per-container surcharges, and Vietnam Railway raising passenger and freight fares 10% and 15% respectively. Agricultural producers are also keeping an eye on production costs climb 3-5%, as maritime freight rates are also moving 25-35% in the wrong direction.
Read more: Reuters (shortage timeline), Reuters (prices), Vietnam News (fare hikes), Vietnam News (agriculture impact), Vietnam News (AV tax)
The Airport Boss Grounded Over Graft
The chairman of Airport Corporation of Vietnam and a deputy general director have been arrested for bid-rigging and bribery, three months before the $12.8 billion Long Thanh International Airport is supposed to open for business. Le Van Phiet, who ran ACV as general director since 2018 and chaired its board since late 2024, allegedly took money to steer contracts on the nation’s biggest infrastructure project. Nguyen Tien Viet, a board member and deputy general director who heads the Long Thanh project management board, has also been detained. ACV runs all 23 airports nationwide, so the allegations cut across the entire state aviation portfolio. The company quietly shuffled its leadership shortly (weeks) before the arrests became public, and while Long Thanh is still scheduled for a June launch, and the financials were due in January, ACV has yet to publish its fourth-quarter 2025 numbers. Despite all this, the stock is up about 15% this year.
Read more: VnExpress
Factory Floor Gold Rush
GE Vernova is putting $200 million into a new high voltage DC (HVDC) transformer plant in Hai Phong, announced at the Energy of Change Summit on March 10, with full operations expected by 2028. The plant will build large power transformers for high-voltage direct current projects, adding to existing plants in Stafford, UK, and India. Foxconn's Bac Ninh subsidiary Fulian Precision Technology Component lifted its charter capital by about 10%, bringing the total to $381.4 million. UK asset manager Gresham House has purchased Asia Clean Capital Vietnam through its SUSI Asia Energy Transition Fund, folding the rooftop solar developer into its regional OASIS platform. All of this means that realized FDI was sitting at $3.21 billion through the end of February for the highest two-month start in five years.
Read more: Vietnam News (founder transition details), Eneconomy (GE HVDC timeline), Eneconomy (Foxconn capital increases), Solarquarter, Eneconomy (sector-wide FDI data)
Seoul's Chip Shop Sets Up in Saigon
Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Chi Dung oversaw the first semiconductor steering committee meeting of the year on Tuesday. The committee is reporting $16 billion in cumulative FDI in 228 projects, with South Korea ponying up 45.3% of the cash. Vietnam now has around 7,000 chip design engineers, plus more than 6,000 engineers and 10,000+ technicians in packaging and testing, most of them working for foreign assembly operations, but the steering committee's own scorecard shows just 13 of 38 strategy tasks completed, with workforce shortages and limited R&D capacity still holding back domestic firms trying to move beyond assembly work for Samsung and its peers.
Read more: Vietnam News
POSCO Bets Big on Battery Brains
POSCO Holdings has given the go-ahead to a roughly quarter billion dollar artificial graphite plant in Thai Nguyen. The plat is expected to churn out up to 55,000 tons of annual anode capacity by 2028. The Korean steelmaker's battery arm, POSCO Future M, already runs an 8,000-ton facility in Pohang (SK), but the northern Vietnam site will have less expensive electrify, lower labor costs, and trade access to US and European markets without the same tariff headaches. Construction will start in 2H of this year, with output phased in as customer orders roll in. Artificial graphite anodes, a chokepoint component in lithium-ion cells, have become a flashpoint as carmakers elbow with each other to get battery supply outside China.
Read more: The Globe and Mail
Hanoi's Laos Insurance Policy
General Secretary To Lam made his third trip to Laos in 18 months this February, pushing a "strategic cohesion" vision that swaps revolutionary bonhomie with infrastructure. Hanoi is handing Vientiane a 60% share in Vung Ang Port and expects to break ground this year on a $6.6 billion railway to connect landlocked Laos to the sea. Laos rolled out a national digital citizen ID system in December 2025 built on Vietnam's VNeID technology, in what is basically an export of Hanoi's governance infrastructure.
Read more: Fulcrum SG, Azertag AZ (cooperation specifics)
Dress Rehearsal for FTSE
FTSE Russell's September upgrade decision is coming, and Vietnam's stock market regulator spent Monday drilling listed companies on annual meeting protocol at a governance forum in Hanoi. The State Securities Commission's vice chairman told executives that international funds watch shareholder meetings as closely as balance sheets, as these days they need board accountability and strategy planning more than the scripted formalities of yesteryear. Relatedly, the new Vietnam Corporate Governance Code published last month brings local standards closer to the OECD ones, and companies are being told that their AGMs need to look like actual shareholder conversations, not the usual scripted affairs, if they want global fund managers to bring money. The real stakes will come in September, when FTSE Russell decides whether to pull the upgrade trigger, a move that will almost immediately funnel billions in passive fund flows into Vietnamese equities.
Read more: Vietnam News
Hanoi Lets Multinationals Drop the Dong
The Ministry of Finance's Circular No. 99/2025/TT-BTC now lets companies ditch the Vietnamese Dong as their accounting currency if most of their cash flows are denominated in dollars, euros, or other foreign currencies. The change from form-based to substance-based rules mean exporters and multinationals will finally be able to book revenues and costs in the currency they mostly use, rather than force-fitting everything into VND and watching their financials blur. Revenue and expense patterns are expected to take priority over financing sources when choosing which currency qualifies.
Read more: Eneconomy
More Rice, Less Money
Vietnamese farmers shipped 1.3 million tonnes of rice in January and February, 5% more than last year, but earned $599.3 million, a drop of 11.2% as average export prices fell on buyers holding back with bets that prices would drop further. The Philippines still takes nearly half the product, but China is suddenly buying nearly six times more than they did a year ago. The winter-spring harvest is flooding southern ports with supply just as freight costs are on the rise, so selling more but pocketing less seems to be the story of the season.
Read more: Eneconomy, VnExpress (freight cost)
Banks Lead the Bounce
The VN-Index was up 1.45% Tuesday to close at 1,676.73 points, breaking a three-session slide that ended Monday with the market's largest single-day drop on record. Seven of the ten biggest gainers were banks, led by Vietcombank and Vietinbank, up 3% to 7%. Materials stocks like Hoa Phat hit ceiling prices. Oil and gas names went the opposite direction, with Binh Son Refinery, Petrolimex and PV Gas all hitting floor prices on crude jitters. The dong softened to ~VND27,200 on the black market, up 1.12% from the weekend, as investors across Asia dumped risk assets and piled into USD.
Read more: Vietnam News (banking rebound), VnExpress
Highlands Coffee Eyes a Listing With Its Latte
Highlands Coffee is working toward a Vietnamese exchange IPO in Q1 2027. Jollibee, which took a 60 percent stake in 2012 when the chain had just 56 stores, has blown it up into a 1,000+ location operation across Vietnam and the Philippines. The listing would give the coffee brand direct access to capital markets as it sets itself up as the leading Vietnamese coffee brand in Southeast Asia. The company has signed international and local advisers to structure the deal. If it goes through, it would be one of the largest food-and-beverage listings the Vietnam has ever seen.
Read more: GCR Mag
From Moscow, With Luggage
A 332% jump in Russian arrivals has catapulted Russia into third place for tourist source markets in February. The month saw 121,493 Russian arrivals. The previous third-top source, Cambodia, cratered from third to ninth after posting just 54,205 visitors, a 75% drop from January. South Korea retook the top spot from mainland China, 971,000 arrivals to 922,000. Total inbound traffic was 2.2 million for the month, up 17.7% year-on-year even as it slipped 9.2% from January. The Russian influx is expected as a result of expanded direct flights from Moscow; Cambodia's plunge likely comes as a result of tightened border crossing counts after the scam compound crackdowns.
Read more: MSN
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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