Overseas investment projects
According to the Ministry of Planning and Investment’s Foreign Investment Agency, Vietnam has attracted about 35,000 foreign direct investment (FDI) projects with total registered capital of about US$420 billion from 141 countries and territories around the world. Of these, 376 investment projects are owned by overseas Vietnamese with total registered capital of US$1.72 billion, focusing on energy, processing and manufacturing, and services.
The energy sector attracts many investors
Vu Van Chung, Deputy Director of the Foreign Investment Agency, said the above figures refer to foreign direct investment in Vietnam, while indirect investment through remittances totals more than US$10 billion annually. In 2021, the amount reached US$12.5 billion.
However, according to Vu Van Chung, there is still ample room for Vietnam to attract more FDI inflows from the growing overseas Vietnamese community with its economic potential and opportunities to access science and technology platforms in developed countries.
In recent years, the government and the National Assembly have introduced many policies to create favorable conditions for foreign investors to do business in Vietnam. Vietnam recently approved a VND350 trillion economic recovery and development program for two years (2022-2023) to speed up post-pandemic recovery, providing an additional favorable opportunity to attract FDI in general, and overseas Vietnamese investment in particular.
Overseas Vietnamese study about investment in Vinh Phuc Province
Focus on solving difficulties
The improved business and investment environment has attracted many overseas Vietnamese entrepreneurs, but major difficulties have affected project implementation and business performance.
Tran Minh Tien, a Vietnamese living in Thailand and founder of a company in Hong Kong (China), has invested US$260 million in four energy projects in Vietnam. However, he said, logistics prices in Vietnam are very high. Investment attraction policies are “quite good”, he said, but project implementation on the level of localities raises numerous problems not in conformity with government regulations.
Nguyen Thanh Hoang, a Vietnamese businessman in Australia, said that although he has been investing in Vietnam for more than 30 years under the 1987 Law on Foreign Investment, his company still faces many difficulties.
Specifically, a provincial people’s committee granted land to one of his projects 10 years ago, but the province is now requesting arrears and an increase in land rent due to the low initial land price. “I have been complaining for nearly four years, but so far the problem has not been resolved,” Hoang said.
Overseas Vietnamese entrepreneurs are urging authorities to establish a support center for overseas investors in Vietnam, which would gather specialists in multiple fields to advise investors and help businesses work with authorities during project implementation.
Overseas investors in Vietnam are urging transparency and uniformity in investment attraction policies to facilitate project implementation.
Nguyen Hoa
