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Headlines:
Hormuz Headache
Seoul Brings the Checkbook to Hanoi
One Chair, Two Hats, Beijing Playbook
Vuong Bets the Farm, Twice
Mega-Projects Can't Find the Hands to Build Them
The Tortoise Laps the Hare
Saigon Offers $190 for Baby Number Two
Tsinghua or Bust
Milk Tea Hits the Ceiling
Diaspora Dollars Dry Up in Saigon
Americans Take the Whole Terminal
Forty Is the New Unemployable
Hormuz Headache
Brent crude tipped $115.6 a barrel and Vietnam is feeling every dollar of it. Diesel rose more than 57% in March, dragging asphalt up almost a third, cement up more than 7%, and cost estimates for major transport projects up by about 8%. Aviation is taking the biggest beating. Vietnam Airlines says jet fuel, normally around a third of its cost base, now consumes half, and each $1 rise in crude adds VND300 billion (~$11.4M) to annual costs. Hanoi is scrambling. The Airports Corporation is looking at fee cuts, Hai Phong zeroed out port infrastructure fees on fuel shipments through the end of the year, the government added VND8 trillion to the fuel subsidy fund, and lawmakers have waived environmental, VAT and special consumption taxes on fuel from April 16 to June 30, at a cost of VND7.3 trillion a month. HSBC's Yun Liu says the 10% full-year growth target is in doubt if energy prices stay as they are; Vietnam gets roughly four-fifths of its crude from the Middle East.
Read more: VnEconomy (fertilizer price), VnEconomy (jet fuel), VnEconomy (fee waiver), VnExpress (reserve buffer)
Seoul Brings the Checkbook to Hanoi
Lee Jae-myung landed in Hanoi as the first foreign leader received by To Lam since his “elevation,” and the two men wasted little time getting down to business. Twelve MOUs resulted from the summit, the headline items being two nuclear agreements between Korea Electric Power Corporation and Vietnam's state energy group for feasibility studies and financing for Ninh Thuan No. 2. It might be worth remembering that’s a plant Japan walked away from because the 2035 timeline was too tight. Hyundai Rotem is expected to sign a ~$110 million contract for metro cars on Ho Chi Minh City's urban rail line; Korean firms are also in talks for a $740 million project in a “southeastern city” and a consulting role on Gia Binh airport. Samsung's talks on a back-end semiconductor plant have made progress, though the size of any deal is still up in the air. Bilateral trade was $94.6 billion last year; the two sides want to see that get to $150 billion by 2030, and both think that’s a realistic target.
Read more: Yonhap (summit), Korea Herald (aid center), Internazionale (Samsung investment), Chosun (KRW contract), Yonhap (KEPCO partner)
One Chair, Two Hats, Beijing Playbook
The National Assembly voted unanimously to give To Lam the state presidency on top of the party general secretaryship he already holds, bending the "four pillars" convention that’s kept power separated between four offices for decades. The last man to wear both hats was Nguyen Phu Trong, who combined them from 2018 to 2021 before being pressured to step back from the presidency. To Lam, confirmed in January for another five-year term as party chief, is treating the double role as a mandate more than a stopgap. A former public security minister who made his name enforcing Trong's anti-corruption purges, among other things, he is now openly studying China's surveillance model and further bilateral security agreements are expected.
Read more: DW
Vuong Bets the Farm, Twice
Pham Nhat Vuong told VinFast shareholders on April 22 that the company will never build a gasoline or hybrid car. The stake in the ground was laid even as other automakers are walking back their EV timelines. The numbers are split. 2025 revenue was more than VND 90 trillion, up 139% on 2024, with net losses of more than VND 97 trillion. VinFast has a bit more than a third of Vietnam's car market, sister company Green SM controls more than half of four-wheel ride-hailing by transaction value, and its charging network numbers 150,000 ports nationwide. For 2026, Vuong wants to deliver 300,000 cars globally, about a third of that number outside Vietnam, which would be a fivefold rise on last year's exports. He expects EBITDA profitability in 2027.
Read more: Vietnam Insiders (Green SM IPO), VnEconomy (charging infrastructure), Nikkei Asia (export jump)
Mega-Projects Can't Find the Hands to Build Them
Long Thanh Airport is 6,000 workers short of the 14,000 it needs, with about 8,500 engineers and laborers on site as of mid-April. The 115-meter passenger terminal that contractors call the project's "heart" has seen daily headcount collapse from about 5,300 before Tet to 1,500, recovering to just 3,400 measured against a need of closer to 6,000. Down at Phu Quoc, where 21 projects tied to APEC 2027 are racing against the same clock, the situation is even worse. One contractor on the Sun Group-led convention center says its workforce is only 30-40% of demand, and AIT, wiring a 220kV substation that has to be live before November 2027, has pushed daily wages to around VND800,000 (US$30), 30-40% above what it had penciled in when it signed the deal. "At this stage we're not calculating profit or loss," said AIT's Dang Xuan Minh. Contractors are now recruiting on basic physical fitness alone, covering travel and meals, paying standby retainers to workers with nothing yet to do, and running three continuous shifts. Fewer young Vietnamese are taking heavy construction work, and a packed southern pipeline, including the Bien Hoa-Vung Tau and HCMC-Long Thanh expressways, means every new project needs to pull workers from the same shallow pool.
Read more: VnExpress (cost escalation), VnExpress (headcounts)
The Tortoise Laps the Hare
Vietnam has officially passed Thailand in PPP-adjusted GDP, hitting $2.03 trillion in the IMF's April 2026 World Economic Outlook. Nominal GDP came in at $527 billion - that’s 34th globally - on 7.1% growth. None of this news is a tremendous surprise to anyone on the ground. A CPA Australia survey of 4,166 firms in 11 Asia-Pacific markets found almost nine-in-ten small businesses in Vietnam are planning expansion in 2026, the highest number of any market polled. The regional average was about two-thirds of companies.
Read more: Vietnam Insiders (PPP/GDP), VnEconomy (SME survey)
Saigon Offers $190 for Baby Number Two
Ho Chi Minh City has doled out VND5 million ($190) to each of 1,310 mothers who have given birth to a second child since September, after health officials declared a demographic "red alert" because of a fertility rate of 1.51, the lowest of any locality in Vietnam. An earlier cohort of 7,650 women got VND3 million apiece under an earlier scheme that ran in the pre-merger city. The payments come ahead of a new Population Law (July 1), which will formally do away with the country's two-child “limit.” For context, Singapore's Baby Bonus pays SGD11,000 ($8,300) per child for the first two, and South Korea gives parents 2 million won ($1,500) at birth and 3 million won on the birth of a second child, on top of years of monthly allowances. Neither country's fertility rate has budged, however.
Read more: VnExpress
Tsinghua or Bust
To Lam's April 14-17 Beijing visit resulted in 52 university cooperation agreements, with Tsinghua and Peking University each signing nine deals with Vietnamese institutions for things including double degrees, doctoral training, and joint research. Hanoi University of Science and Technology anchored its Peking deal on engineering and data science; Vietnam National University Hanoi went to Tsinghua for political science, international relations and linguistics.
Read more: VnExpress (institutional turnout)
Milk Tea Hits the Ceiling
Mixue closed 428 stores globally last year, with Indonesia and Vietnam, its two biggest overseas markets, absorbing much of the pain. The closures come as a 3,000-person iPOS survey in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi shows out-of-home coffee and milk tea visits plateauing. Almost two-fifths of respondents drank out at most twice a week last year, up from a third in 2024. The VND35,000 to 50,000 band is now the market's power band, as well as its most crowded. Mixue's VND10,000 to 30,000 pricing play built the mass market, but it seems that the mass market has decided it's full. The chain had 1,304 Vietnam stores in Q4, but now wants to rationalize the footprint to fewer, bigger, better-located outlets with bigger prep counters and street-facing storefronts.
Read more: VnExpress (revenue/profits), VnExpress (consumer spending)
Diaspora Dollars Dry Up in Saigon
Remittances to Ho Chi Minh City fell to just over $2 billion in Q1 2026, down almost a sixth from the previous quarter and almost a fifth from a year earlier, according to the State Bank of Vietnam's Region 2 branch. The headline reasons are familiar: a sluggish global recovery, sticky inflation in the countries where overseas Vietnamese earn their money, tight monetary policy abroad, and the Middle East conflict pushing up energy spending. The quieter admission is domestic. The dong-dollar interest rate gap has narrowed to a point that sending money to Vietnam now feels less rewarding, and local investment products haven't given the diaspora a compelling reason to put capital to work at home.
Read more: VnExpress (official attribution), VnEconomy (city recovery)
Americans Take the Whole Terminal
AG&P LNG has agreed to buy Hai Linh's 51% stake in the Cai Mep LNG import terminal in Vung Tau province, giving US-based Nebula Energy full ownership of one of only two operational LNG import facilities in Vietnam. AG&P already owned the other 49%. The terminal, connected by pipeline to the 3.9-gigawatt Phu My power station, has been supplying gas-fired plants and industrial customers in southern Vietnam since late 2025. AG&P wants to double throughput from 3 million to 6 million tonnes annually. Hai Linh says it's going to redirect capital to its core petroleum business and the Hiep Phuoc power project. The deal is pending regulatory approval.
Read more: Vietnam Insiders (storage specs), Gasworld (global network)
Forty Is the New Unemployable
Ho Chi Minh City's Q1 labor market had 82,700 open positions chasing just 52,600 applicants, yet workers aged 36-49, the largest applicant pool (almost 21,000 people), were targeted by a measly 0.32% of postings. Industrial park and export-zone employers want workers under 35, because they are seen as more adaptable to shift work and new machinery. More than four-fifths of required no more than a high school education.
Read more: VnExpress
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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