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Headlines:
Hormuz Chokehold Hits the Tarmac
Nineteen Ships Want Hormuz Escort
Assembled Here, Designed in Shenzhen
Five Percent for 37 Years
Saigon's Big Dig
200-to-1 Crypto Welcome Mat
Black Market Dollar Gap Widens as Gold Soars
King of Fruits Takes a Beating
Inspector on the Take, Sick Pork on the Plate
Pork Bellies Hit the Trading Floor
Long Bien Holds, Metro Line Folds
Director to Doorman: CGV Pays Up
Tokyo Needs Drivers, Hanoi Has Them
Hormuz Chokehold Hits the Tarmac
Jet fuel went as high as $234 per barrel on March 24, about double pre-conflict levels, and airlines are managing by adding surcharges of up to 17% on the longest domestic routes. Under a plan now in front of the Ministry of Construction, the cost of a Hanoi-Phu Quoc ticket would rise from $152 to $178, and Vietnam Airlines/ Vietjet will cut domestic capacity by up to 26% and 22% respectively starting yesterday, first by dropping late-night and low-demand services entirely. Gasoline prices rose by half and diesel is up 70% since February before the government zeroed out environmental protection taxes, slashed excise and VAT levies, and tapped $304 million from last year's budget surplus to try and bring some relief to the market. The PM is ordering the build-out of a strategic petroleum depot in Thanh Hoa's Nghi Son commune. Currently domestic reserves cover less than 30 days of use, less than what regional peers are sitting on.
Read more: Fulcrum (import dollar figures), VnExpress (ticket surcharge breakdown), VnEconomy (depot construction order), VnExpress (price drops).
Nineteen Ships Want Hormuz Escort
The maritime authority is putting a request in to Iran for the safe passage of 19 ships through the Strait of Hormuz, including four flying Vietnam’s flag and 15 registered under foreign flags. The request includes a formal transit notice from Iran so shippers can get war-risk insurance, which insurers are unwilling to give without Iranian confirmation.
Read more: Maritimefairtrade, VnExpress
Assembled Here, Designed in Shenzhen
Trump's tariff war has poured fuel on a manufacturing shift, maybe just not the one he had in mind. A Bloomberg analysis of customs data shows that Chinese manufacturers pushed much of their final assembly across the border, but so far have kept core production at home. Some factories are adding less than 8% to export values before shipping onward, leaving total US electronics imports essentially flat. Foxconn subsidiary Fukang Technology, for example exported $8.6 billion in MacBooks, iPads and related motherboards last year, but they imported $7.9 billion in components from China, South Korea and Taiwan.
Read more: Bloomberg
Five Percent for 37 Years
The new Law on Digital Technology Industry is giving semiconductor manufacturers a 5% corporate tax rate for 37 years, one of the best deals on the planet right now. Projects starting at roughly $231 million qualify, a figure about a fifth less than comparable deals in other priority sectors. The package includes six years of full tax exemption followed by 13 years at half rate, plus five-year income tax holidays for specialized staff. The pitch seems to be working, FDI hit about $38 billion in 2025, up from 2024’s ~$27 billion.
Read more: VnEconomy (tax specifics), Weissratings (FDI figures), VnEconomy (regional context)
Saigon's Big Dig
Ho Chi Minh City has sucked up nearly $2.9 billion in FDI so far this year. The money is coming as the city races to wire together a $20 billion, 187-kilometer metro network by 2030 and Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh is setting a hard fourth-quarter deadline for Long Thanh International Airport to start commercial flights. Chinh inspected the site on March 29 and told contractors to hustle so they can get construction done by September. Nearly 9,000 workers are on site at Long Thanh. About three quarters of the total contracted value is already done.
Read more: VnEconomy (retail sales data), VnExpress
200-to-1 Crypto Welcome Mat
The Ministry of Finance published a crypto tax framework that gives foreign institutional a 200x tax advantage over domestic ones. By the rules of Circular 32, foreign institutions trading crypto via local service providers need to pay 0.1% on transaction revenue, but domestic companies will be on the hook for a 20% corporate tax on their gains. Individual traders, foreign or local, will also get the 0.1% flat rate. VAT doesn't apply to crypto transfers or trading. The rules will be in force through a pilot that requires exchanges to post roughly VND9.5 trillion (about $390 million) in paid-in capital and limits foreign ownership to 49%. Chainalysis figures that Vietnam processed $220 to $230 billion in on-chain volume between mid-2024 to mid-2025, making it one of the top three markets in Asia-Pacific.
Read more: VnEconomy (VAT exemption), Westafricatradehub (capital requirements)
Black Market Dollar Gap Widens as Gold Soars
The dong is getting squeezed. Unofficial exchange points were unloading dollars for VND27,970, a 6.1% premium over Vietcombank's official rate, as safe-haven flows pushed the greenback toward its biggest monthly gain since July last year. The cost of Saigon Jewelry Company's gold bars this week were trading at VND177.2 million/ tael, a hefty local premium that’s about VND29 million higher than what global prices would indicate the stuff should trade hands for. Savers are apparently on the hunt for hard assets and currency, whatever the markup.
Read more: VnExpress (yen intervention speculation), VnExpress (VND29M premium), VnExpress (13% YTD gains)
King of Fruits Takes a Beating
Durian prices across the Mekong Delta have collapsed 35-40% since late February as the domestic harvest met a Thai production boom. Farmers who bet on export demand are being forced to dump the fruit at home instead. One Dong Thap grower sold her entire orchard for 21% less than she was expecting the month before after waiting for a rebound that never came. Thai growers are reportedly making headway in the Chinese market share by way of meeting higher safety and traceability standards.
Read more: VnExpress
Inspector on the Take, Sick Pork on the Plate
Hanoi police arrested eight scofflaws in mid-March, including meat inspectors, for allowing 300 tons of African Swine Fever-contaminated pork to get to city markets and school cafeterias over a three-month period. The bad pig came from a slaughterhouse in the Van Phuc livestock slaughtering facility. ASF doesn't threaten human health directly, but outbreaks have been on the rise, from 714 in 2023 to 1,609 in 2024 to 2,782 in 2025, and more than 1.27 million pigs were culled last year. The Hanoi case follows another bust in Hai Phong, where police took down a network that sent roughly 125 tons of ASF-infected pork into a canned food company's warehouse. About two tons of it had already been processed and labeled by the time authorities stepped in.
Read more: Afludiary Blogspot
Pork Bellies Hit the Trading Floor
Staying in the swine-o-sphere, Ho Chi Minh City is putting pork carcasses on the Mercantile Exchange of Vietnam, the first time a domestic commodity exchange has listed meat. The city chews through 13,000 to 14,000 pigs daily in a market that is work almost a billion dollars annually ($960+ million). Trading will be voluntary and will run alongside traditional distribution channels. Only post-slaughter carcasses that meet traceability and food safety standards are eligible for listing.
Read more: VnEconomy
Long Bien Holds, the Metro Line Folds
Hanoi closed its French colonial Long Bien Bridge on April 1 for emergency repairs after a steel truss joint fractured completely, snapping the connecting plate and separating the upper chord members from the truss nodes. The bridge, built in 1902, runs 1,691 meters over the Red River with a patchwork of original spans and wartime replacements, was supposed to retire in 2020 when Metro Line 1 opened with a new river crossing. That metro line, first approved in 2004, has never broken ground and is now penciled in for the 2030-2035 construction period. A previous repair in 2015, which came at a cost of nearly $11.4 million, was designed to keep the bridge alive only until 2020. The span now carrying dozens of daily passenger and freight trains as well as thousands of motorbikes.
Read more: VnExpress
Director to Doorman: CGV Pays Up
CJ CGV Vietnam is being ordered to pay $285,000 to a British marketing director it demoted to (get this:) cinema lobby supervisor before firing him in 2015. Benedict Daniel Sullivan signed on as Sales and Marketing Director on Jan. 1, 2014, at a $4,000 monthly salary plus allowances and commissions. He then went on to ink 127 advertising contracts before CEO Dongwon Kwak decided that his talents were best used supervising a District 7 lobby that October. Sullivan resigned his director title in December 2014, effective Jan. 19, 2015, but the company dismissed him the next day, with no formal termination notice. After nearly a decade of litigation, the March 26 verdict found the Korean cinema chain had been "careless" in treating Sullivan's resignation letter as grounds for termination.
Read more: VnExpress
Tokyo Needs Drivers, Hanoi Has Them
In a bid to fill it’s own labor shortage, Japan is to start testing taxi, bus, and truck drivers in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Da Nang today as part of its Specified Skilled Worker visa program. Candidates will be required to pass both a Japanese language test and a skills exam. Once they pass, they’ll be allowed into Japan for a period (six months to a year, depending on license type) where they can work toward converting their Vietnamese licenses to Japanese ones. If they can’t do it in time, they’ll be expected to return to Vietnam.
Read more: VnEconomy
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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