Phuong Uyen Tran
Vietnam’s private sector now makes up 96.6 percent of the country’s more than one million registered businesses, according to the 2025 Vietnam Private Economy Report released by VCCI this year. Yet by the same report, only 8.8 percent of those companies say they have introduced any form of product innovation. There is clear room for more capability development among businesses.
Vietnam’s own numbers make the clear business case. Over 80 percent of private firms employ fewer than 50 people; more than 70 percent hold charter capital under 10 billion dong; 92.6 percent remain family-managed. And this year, for the first time, customer acquisition — cited by 60.2 percent of firms — overtook access to capital as the leading constraint businesses report, with 64.4 percent of manufacturers specifically citing weak market demand. VCCI’s newly launched PCI 2.0 and Business Performance Index, alongside the consolidation of 63 provinces into 34, are attempts to answer a demand-side problem as much as a financing one: firms don’t just need room to operate, they need markets that reward what they build.
One line from this year’s report captures the choice ahead better than any single statistic: what Vietnamese enterprises need most is clear and consistent rules. These will help companies obtain the confidence make significant and bold investment their capability for the long run. That is the logic behind three decades of decisions at Tan Hiep Phat. In 2009, we became the first beverage company in Vietnam to invest in aseptic filling technology that retains nutrients and flavor without preservatives; today we operate twelve aseptic lines, a commitment north of $300 million, that has also cut water use by up to 91 percent and bottling energy use by 31 percent. A parallel lightweight-bottle program has eliminated 78,000 tons of plastic since 2014. None of it was required by regulation. It was required by the markets — in the United States, Japan, Germany, and more than twenty countries — that we chose to compete in. We have seen over the three decades that capability, once built, compounds.
This year’s report is right to celebrate how far Vietnam’s private sector has come in sheer number. That scale is the foundation; building capability is the natural next step in the country’s competitiveness.
“We have seen over the three decades that capability, once built, compounds”.
— Phương Uyen Tran
