Vietnam’s Communist Party chief To Lam has set an ambitious economic agenda for the country, targeting annual GDP growth exceeding 10 percent through 2030. Alongside sweeping anti-corruption pledges and aggressive administrative reform — including abolishing eight ministries and slashing 150,000 state jobs — Lam is positioning Vietnam for accelerated development and deeper global trade integration.
One of the key pillars of Lam’s economic development strategy is fostering “national champions,” globally competitive private conglomerates in advanced industries. Resolution 68, adopted by Vietnam’s Politburo in May 2025, represents a cornerstone of Lam’s economic modernization agenda. It explicitly elevates the private sector to the “most important force” in the economy and sets a concrete target of developing at least 20 national champions by 2030.
The national champions concept is Vietnam’s attempt to replicate the chaebol model that drove South Korea’s industrialization: large, well-capitalized private firms with state backing, preferential access to credit and land, priority in public procurement, and support for international expansion through a dedicated “Go Global” program. Nhan Dan, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Vietnam, notes that firms Samsung and Hyundai shifted an entire economy from agriculture to advanced industry within decades by investing in technology, absorbing knowledge from foreign partners, and competing internationally. Vietnam’s leadership asserts that without comparable domestic anchors, the country will remain permanently dependent on foreign capital and permanently exposed to the decisions of multinationals whose commitment to Vietnam is purely transactional.
The firms most likely to emerge as designated champions are drawn from Vietnam’s existing private conglomerate elite. These firms include Vingroup which is expanding in electric vehicles through its VinFast brand; FPT, Southeast Asia’s largest IT services provider; Hoa Phat, the region’s largest steelmaker; Thaco, a large logistics and infrastructure company; and low-cost airline Vietjet.
Vietnam’s government argues national champions are necessary because the private sector, despite contributing 60 percent of GDP, remains fragmented and undersized relative to regional competitors. Without large domestically owned firms anchoring supply chains, Vietnam believes it cannot transition from FDI-dependent assembler to the home of innovative world-beating companies. Resolution 68 represents Hanoi’s most explicit acknowledgment of this structural gap and an admission that private sector leadership is an economic necessity. Entrepreneurs are now designated “soldiers on the economic front” entrusted with driving industrialization.
But some argue that attempting to follow Korea’s lead brings significant risks. Although many of Vietnam’s leading conglomerates are engaged in priority growth sectors (technology and IT services, manufacturing and steel, energy, logistics, aviation), most conglomerates are focused on finance and property rather than the export-oriented manufacturing that drove Korean and Taiwanese development. Concentrating additional resources in conglomerates when there is already a complex cross-ownership structure between many banks and conglomerates creates systemic fragility. The Van Thinh Phat scandal, where a developer siphoned $12.5 billion from a commercial bank through nominee arrangements, illustrates the danger. Lam’s consolidation of one-man rule compounds this by concentrating both economic and political risk without credible oversight mechanisms.
The national champions strategy also does little to address Vietnam’s deeper structural vulnerability: its heavy reliance on imported components. Foreign-invested enterprises account for over 70 percent of exports by value, yet continue to import most inputs. For instance, none of Apple’s 30-plus Vietnam-based suppliers are locally owned. Funneling preferential credit and public procurement toward a handful of selected conglomerates risks crowding out the broader industrial ecosystem needed to build genuine domestic supply chains. Without that foundation, Vietnam’s manufacturing sector may remain an assembly platform rather than a value-creating engine. Concentrating bets on twenty national champions, without a clear oversight framework, simply replicates at a larger scale the opacity and corruption risks that have historically undermined similar state-directed industrial strategies elsewhere in Asia.
Furthermore, the effort to develop national champions the way South Korea developed chaebols may not be possible due to the constraints imposed by Vietnam’s international trade obligations. Since joining the WTO in 2007, Vietnam has been bound by the Subsidies and Countervailing Measures Agreement, which prohibits subsidies tied to export performance or domestic content, and by the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures, which bans the local content requirements and performance standards that were central to East Asian developmental strategies. Vietnam’s extensive network of twenty FTAs compounds these constraints further, restricting the use of export subsidies, local content mandates and discriminatory investment incentives — the very instruments that underpinned South Korea’s and Taiwan’s rapid industrialization. As a result, Lam’s industrial policy toolkit is oriented almost entirely around domestic instruments — tax incentives, R&D deductions, procurement preferences, and land access — with limited mechanisms for conditioning state support on the export performance that defined the world-famous brands enjoyed by South Korean chaebols.
The same structural weaknesses that expose the national champions strategy to criticism, however, are precisely what create significant opportunities for foreign investors who can credibly help address them. Lam has staked considerable personal and political capital on this agenda, and with his consolidation of control over the government apparatus now complete. Therefore, the focus on developing twenty national champions is unlikely to be diverted. Investors who position themselves to help address the strategy’s structural weaknesses (by investing in inherently export-oriented sectors like manufacturing or building out domestic supply chain capacity) are best placed to benefit from government support while hedging against the risks of the strategy falling short.
Perhaps the most compelling entry point is investment in Vietnam’s domestic supply chain capacity. Firms that sell into or service the national champions carry considerably lower risk than the champions themselves. Adjacent firms capture much of the upside from state backing of the national champions, benefiting as the champions spend and scale, without bearing the governance, political, and execution risks that come with being the high-profile political vehicles of Lam’s development agenda. Firms that contribute to the domestic supply chain also directly address one of Hanoi’s most pressing structural vulnerabilities: the heavy dependence on imported components. Investors operating in this space align naturally with government priorities, making regulatory approvals smoother and policy support more predictable, a significant advantage in a market where bureaucratic friction remains a real cost.
Foreign investors who can credibly offer technology transfer and domestic capacity development for national champions — rather than positioning themselves as pure manufacturers or capital providers — also stand to benefit from preferential treatment from Vietnamese regulators. Technology transfer sits at the core of Lam’s economic agenda: he has explicitly warned that “Vietnam cannot be allowed to remain just an assembly and processing base, a technological dumping ground for the world, while its domestic firms gain no know-how.” That rhetoric has been backed by concrete policy through the revised Law on Technology Transfer, effective April 2025, which introduced new incentives for foreign-invested projects that include technology transfer commitments, workforce training, and domestic capability development with preferential treatment now extended across investment approvals, taxation, land access, and credit. For investors who can structure their market entry around joint capability development – whether through co-investing in R&D, transferring proprietary processes, or training Vietnamese engineers and managers – the political will behind the national champions agenda represents a meaningful commercial advantage.
These two approaches could be the most powerful in combination. A foreign investor who supplies into Vietnam’s domestic supply chain while structuring that relationship around technology transfer and workforce development addresses two of Hanoi’s most urgent vulnerabilities at once — import dependency and value-chain stagnation — and in doing so becomes the kind of partner the government is most incentivized to protect, promote, and reward.
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Maxwell Abbott
Maxwell Abbott is a Principal at Meriwether & Co., a specialist advisory firm helping investors and corporations navigate political risk and geostrategy across Asia-Pacific. He brings over a decade of experience combining political risk analysis, strategic intelligence, and on-the-ground investigations across the region, with particular expertise in Southeast Asia.