Vietnam Is Not Waiting for You to Be Ready

Insights from the Scaling Business Summit 2026, Ho Chi Minh City.

The room was filled with founders, investors, and operators, many of them international, most of them watching Vietnam closely. The conversation was not about potential. It was about pace.

Hang Vu, Managing Partner at RSI Consulting Asia, and Lach Baniya, Forbes 30 Under 30 and Founder at Manal Property Advisory, took the stage for a fireside talk that cut straight to the structural realities driving Vietnam’s mega development ambitions. Smart cities, green ports, international financial centers, offshore wind, none of it theoretical.

What followed was a sharp, honest look at where the windows are open, what is holding the transformation back, and why the clock is running faster than most international observers realize.

1. Data Is Still Broken and That’s the Opportunity

Digital transformation has been a talking point in Vietnam for decades. The results have been uneven. The core problem, as Hang Vu put it plainly, is that “data remains very fragmented or even absent and that makes companies very hard to adopt AI, automation, or any digital transformation.”

Vietnam’s VneID initiative, a super app designed to consolidate citizen services from passport renewal to property registration into a single platform illustrates the scale of the challenge. The vision is right. The infrastructure work is enormous. Moving data from disconnected offline sources into real-time, unified systems is not a software problem. It is a coordination problem.

The next phase, Hang Vu argued, is interoperability. Smart cities, smart ports, industrial logistics, none of it functions unless data from each part of the ecosystem links to the whole. The companies that solve the connective tissue problem, not just the feature layer, will own the most defensible position in Vietnam’s digital infrastructure.

Lesson 1: The scarcest resource in Vietnam’s transformation is not capital or talent, it is clean, connected data. Build for the pipe, not just the product.

2. Don’t Arrive With a Product. Arrive With Presence.

The single most repeated instruction in this session was deceptively simple: be in the room. Not to pitch. Not to close. To engage.

Hang Vu shared the example of a German business partner who has spent nearly three years in Vietnam building toward circular economy solutions. He arrived without a product roadmap and spent his first years doing education, raising awareness, and forming relationships across government bodies, industry partners, and urban planning authorities. The result? When local partners need to build at scale for an industrial park, for a city, for an entire province, he is the first call.

“You do not need to come with a single-minded, standalone product,” Hang Vu said. “Come here, engage early, and form meaningful partnerships with the relevant partners.”

Those partners might be a state-owned enterprise. They might be the developer of an aviation financial hub or an international maritime center. They need tech companies more than they admit because they have always done logistics. They have never built a green port.

This is not a slow-play strategy. It is the most efficient path to large-scale commercial engagement in Vietnam’s current build cycle.

Lesson 2: The fastest route to a deal at scale in Vietnam is not a product deck, it is consistent, early presence before the deal exists.

3. Capital Has a New Address: Vietnam’s IFC

Vietnam needs $150 billion in capital just to double its energy capacity from 80 gigawatts today to 150 gigawatts by 2030. Most of that investment must come from outside. The old mechanisms were not built for that volume.

One month before this session, Vietnam launched its International Financial Centre (VIFC) in Ho Chi Minh City. Hang Vu spent weeks briefing former ambassadors and chairs of global asset management funds on the initiative. The consistent complaint she heard: investors could not reliably repatriate capital from Vietnam. The VIFC directly addresses that. It operates under a distinct jurisdiction with common law, English-language proceedings, and international judges. Court decisions are final and binding with no government veto. “Within the IFC, money comes in and out very flexibly,” Hang Vu said. “It is a completely different jurisdiction.”

Lach Baniya, who lives near Dubai’s DIFC, noted the parallels and the ambition. Vietnam studied Dubai, Estonia, London, and Shanghai and is adopting international legal standards from the start. The legal frameworks issued for the Vietnam IFC match what you find in the world’s most established financial centers. Ho Chi Minh City’s IFC opened officially this week.

Lesson 3: Vietnam has built the financial infrastructure international capital has been waiting for. The access problem is solved. The question is who moves first.

4. Get Rich Before You Get Old

Vietnam has approximately 67 million people in its workforce today. Its fertility rate is 1.9, below the 2.1 replacement threshold. The demographic window is roughly 20 years. By 2045, the country must reach high-income developed status, or it will not get another shot within this generation.

“We have to get rich before we get old,” Hang Vu said. This is not a slogan. It is the structural logic behind every policy decision: the urgency of double-digit growth targets, the accountability now imposed on provincial leaders, the push to adopt automation and AI not as innovation experiments but as productivity necessities.

Technology is not optional in this frame. Smart solutions raise output per worker. Green solutions preserve access to international markets that now demand sustainability credentials. Both are load-bearing requirements, not aspirational features. For international investors and tech companies, this creates a specific urgency. “Don’t wait five months,” Hang Vu said. “Engage now. Make a couple more visits in the next few months. Look closely on the ground.” The companies arriving today will shape what gets built. The ones who wait will find fewer open doors and less room to shape the ecosystem.

Lesson 4: Vietnam’s growth imperative is demographic and irreversible. The companies who treat this as urgent will earn the partnerships that come with it.

5. Accountability Is Now the Operating System

Vietnam’s party congress has locked in the direction. Targets are set. Responsibilities are assigned. And for the first time at scale, the public sector is being held to the same standard as the private sector.

“If your province doesn’t meet its double-digit target, you are out,” Hang Vu said. “That kind of accountability is unprecedented in Vietnam.”

Provincial officials are on their toes. Ministries are moving fast. The phrase ‘Asian speed’ came up more than once. Nobody is waiting anymore.

Lach Baniya drew the comparison to Dubai’s 2040 Urban Master Plan, 11 coordinated agendas, clear metrics, and public accountability that becomes its own form of country marketing. Vietnam is building toward the same model. Clarity plus consequence creates momentum that is hard to stop. For any company entering this market, that accountability culture changes how you negotiate, how you structure timelines, and how you earn trust with local partners who are also under real pressure to deliver.

Lesson 5: Vietnam’s execution is no longer aspirational, it is institutional. Accountability runs from provincial governors to private sector. Build your partnerships with that in mind.

The CEO Execution Playbook: What to Do Tomorrow

1. 1. Solve for interoperability, not just features. Identify one data integration problem in your current or target market. Map who owns each silo and what it would take to connect them.
2. 2. Go to Vietnam before you have a product to sell. Book the visit this quarter. The goal is one meaningful conversation with a potential ecosystem partner, government body, SOE, or platform developer.
3. 3. Learn the VIFC structure this week. Send your CFO or legal team to review the VIFC framework. Understand what it means for capital entry, repatriation, and dispute resolution before your next board conversation on Vietnam.
4. 4. Pressure-test your Vietnam timeline against the demographic window. If your 12-month entry plan stretches to 24 months, what changes? The companies setting roots now have a structural advantage that compounds over time.
5. 5. Treat your local partners’ KPIs as your own. Find out what targets your Vietnamese counterparts are held to. Align your deliverables to their accountability cycle. That is how you become indispensable.

→ Watch the full conversation on YouTube