Vietnam has absorbed on the order of $500 billion in registered foreign investment since 1988 and sent out barely a twentieth of that. The companies that did go abroad form a short and revealing list: Viettel, the army-owned telecom that built networks in ten countries from Cambodia to Peru; FPT, whose software arm crossed $1 billion of overseas revenue in 2023 on the strength of Japan; and VinFast, whose attempt to sell electric cars in the United States and Europe has cost its founder billions and forced a retreat to Asia. Behind them, Vinamilk, Thaco, Masan and a scattering of startups have made smaller bets. The pattern is that Vietnamese companies expand well where they can export a cost advantage and struggle where they must build a brand, and that the state, through capital controls and licensing, still decides who is allowed to try.
The first outbound wave of Vietnamese companies is small, uneven and instructive, because it shows what a low-cost manufacturing economy can and cannot export besides goods. Thirty years after foreign multinationals began building in Vietnam, in the inbound wave described in the China Plus One story, a handful of Vietnamese firms have begun building elsewhere, and the results range from one of the more successful frontier-market telecom expansions of the century to one of the most expensive automotive launches in recent memory. This article examines why Viettel, FPT and VinFast went abroad, what each model was, where the money came from, what went wrong, and what the experience means for the next generation of Vietnamese founders who assume that a global business is the natural end point of a domestic one. It is part of the Vietnam Company Stories hub.
Why has Vietnamese outbound investment been so small?
Because capital was scarce and controlled. The State Bank restricts foreign-currency transfers, every outbound project needs a government licence, and until the 2010s few Vietnamese firms had the balance sheet to fund a foreign subsidiary through years of losses. The three that led were state-backed, cash-generative or founder-funded.
Which expansion model has worked best?
Exporting a cost and capability advantage into a service: FPT selling engineering hours to Japanese and American clients, and Viettel selling cheap network build-outs to frontier governments. Consumer-brand expansion, VinFast’s route, has been the hardest and most expensive.
What is the lesson for founders?
Go abroad with an advantage that travels, into markets where Vietnamese cost structures matter, and fund it from something that will not run out. The cautionary cases are those that mistook a domestic monopoly or a founder’s wealth for a global competitive position.
Why did Viettel go to Cambodia and Laos before it had finished conquering Vietnam?
Because its leadership believed the domestic market would saturate within a decade and that a military-run company with cheap engineers and an appetite for rural build-outs could replicate its home strategy in poorer countries where incumbents had neglected coverage. It launched Metfone in Cambodia and Unitel in Laos in 2009.
Viettel had overtaken the state incumbents VNPT and MobiFone at home by covering the countryside first, at prices the others considered uneconomic, and its then chief executive Nguyα» n MαΊ‘nh HΓΉng, later minister of information and communications, argued that the same playbook would work anywhere with low mobile penetration and a government willing to license a Vietnamese partner. The company’s status, examined in the Viettel profile, gave it two advantages private rivals lacked: the political backing to negotiate licences government to government, and access to state capital without the return discipline of a listed firm.
The expansion proceeded outward in rings. Cambodia and Laos, both neighbours with close Vietnamese political ties, came first and became the most profitable, with Metfone and Unitel each reaching market leadership within a few years. Haiti followed in 2011, Mozambique in 2012, East Timor in 2013, Cameroon and Peru in 2014, Burundi and Tanzania in 2015, and finally Myanmar in 2018, where Mytel, a joint venture with military-linked local partners, became the fourth operator and grew rapidly until the 2021 coup complicated everything. By 2020 Viettel Global reported operations in ten markets with a combined population several times Vietnam’s own.
The financial record is mixed but, over the whole portfolio, positive. Viettel Global, the listed holding company for the overseas operations, reported revenue on the order of $3 billion in 2024 with double-digit growth and profits driven by Cambodia, Laos, Peru, Mozambique and Myanmar, while carrying accumulated losses from Cameroon, where a dispute with its local partner and licensing authorities effectively cost it control of Nexttel, from Haiti, where security and currency collapse made the business unmanageable, and from Burundi and Tanzania, where currency devaluation ate the returns in dollar terms. The lesson the company drew, and states publicly, is that frontier telecoms is a portfolio business in which two or three markets pay for the rest.
How did FPT build a billion-dollar software export business from Hanoi?
By selling Vietnamese engineering hours to Japanese companies at a discount to Indian and Chinese rivals, starting in 2000, and then compounding for two decades. FPT Software’s overseas revenue crossed $1 billion in 2023 and continued growing at 20 to 30 percent a year, with Japan supplying roughly half.
The origin was a deliberate bet by founder TrưƑng Gia Bình, who in 1999 decided that FPT, then a systems integrator and distributor at home, would become a software exporter on the Indian model. The first attempts in the United States and Europe failed, and the company turned to Japan, where a shortage of engineers, a preference for long relationships and a cultural distance from India created an opening. FPT trained thousands of programmers in Japanese, opened an office in Tokyo in 2005, and grew with clients in automotive, industrial and financial software who valued the combination of cost, loyalty and willingness to take on unglamorous legacy work. The full arc is told in the FPT story.
The second phase, from about 2014, was acquisition-led diversification. FPT bought RWE IT Slovakia in 2014, its first foreign acquisition; Intellinet, an American consultancy, in 2018; Base.vn at home in 2021; Cardinal Peak in the United States in 2023; and, in 2024, AOSIS in France, Next Advanced Communications in Japan and a stake in a German automotive-software firm. Each deal bought client relationships and domain expertise, typically in automotive software, energy and financial services, that the Vietnamese delivery centres then serviced at lower cost. By 2025 the company reported clients in around 30 countries, delivery centres in India, the Philippines and Costa Rica as well as Vietnam, and an explicit ambition to reach $5 billion in overseas revenue by 2030.
The strategic vulnerability is the same one facing every offshore services business: the model sells labour arbitrage, and both the arbitrage and the labour are under pressure. Vietnamese software wages have risen at high single-digit rates for a decade, narrowing the gap with India, and generative AI threatens to compress the hours that clients will pay for. FPT’s response has been to move into higher-value work, an AI partnership with NVIDIA announced in 2024, and semiconductor design and automotive software subsidiaries, and to acquire its way up the value chain. Whether a company built on cost can complete that transition is the open question of its next decade.
What happened when VinFast tried to sell cars in America?
It listed on Nasdaq in August 2023 through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, briefly commanded a market value above $190 billion on a tiny float, then watched deliveries in the United States fall far short of plan while losses reached roughly $3 billion a year. By 2025 the company had delayed its North Carolina plant to 2028 and refocused on Asia.
The ambition was unprecedented for a Vietnamese company. Vingroup, the conglomerate profiled in the Vinhomes story, had launched VinFast in 2017 with a factory at HαΊ£i PhΓ²ng built in 21 months, and its founder PhαΊ‘m NhαΊt Vượng declared that the brand would compete in the United States and Europe from the start rather than establish itself at home first. The company shipped its first VF 8 crossovers to California in late 2022, opened showrooms there, and announced a $4 billion plant in North Carolina. The SPAC listing valued the business at $23 billion at completion; the thin float and speculative trading pushed the market capitalisation far higher for a few weeks before it fell back by more than 90 percent.
The American market was unforgiving. Early reviews criticised software and ride quality, the VF 8’s pricing was uncompetitive against Tesla and Hyundai, and US deliveries in 2023 and 2024 numbered in the low thousands, a large share of them to GSM, the ride-hailing company also controlled by the founder. A recall, a fatal crash under investigation and dealer complaints added to the difficulty. The company reported global deliveries of about 97,000 vehicles in 2024, the overwhelming majority in Vietnam and a substantial portion to related parties. The full financial architecture is dissected in the VinFast profile.
The pivot was explicit by 2025. VinFast opened an assembly plant in Tamil Nadu, India, in August 2025, advanced a plant in Indonesia, entered the Philippines and Middle East, scaled back its European retail operations, and set targets for 2025 and 2026 dominated by Vietnam and emerging Asian markets where its price point and its founder’s willingness to fund losses could work. The North Carolina plant, originally due in 2024, was pushed to 2028. PhαΊ‘m NhαΊt Vượng had by then committed to fund the company with a personal contribution and loans reported in the billions of dollars, converting a listed global carmaker into something closer to a founder-financed venture with a foreign listing.
Who else went abroad, and where did the smaller bets go?
Mostly to neighbours and to specialised acquisitions. Vinamilk bought dairy assets in the United States, New Zealand and Cambodia; Thaco and HoΓ ng Anh Gia Lai planted agriculture across Laos and Cambodia; Masan bought a German tungsten refiner; and a cluster of software, gaming and fintech startups built global user bases from Vietnamese engineering teams.
Vinamilk’s expansion was the most disciplined. The dairy company, examined in its own profile, bought Driftwood Dairy in California in 2013, took a stake in Miraka in New Zealand to secure milk powder supply, built the Angkor Milk plant in Cambodia in 2016 and a farm joint venture in Laos, each acquisition serving supply security or a market adjacent to its home base rather than a bid for global brand status. TH Group, its private rival, built dairy farms in Russia from 2016 with capital reportedly in the billions, a bet that the war and sanctions since 2022 have made difficult to assess.
The agricultural conglomerates took a different route. HoΓ ng Anh Gia Lai, a property developer turned rubber and fruit grower, planted tens of thousands of hectares in Laos and Cambodia in the 2010s, borrowed heavily against them and was rescued in part by Thaco, whose agricultural arm took over much of the portfolio in 2018 and 2019 and now runs banana, durian and cattle operations across the three countries. The Thaco founder’s approach is described in the Thaco story. Masan’s purchase of H.C. Starck’s tungsten business in Germany in 2020, to process ore from its NΓΊi PhΓ‘o mine, is the clearest example of a Vietnamese firm buying a foreign industrial asset to move up its own value chain.
The startups are a category of their own. VNG built games and Zalo for Vietnamese users but its games studio and cloud businesses sell abroad; Sky Mavis, the studio behind Axie Infinity, was a global crypto-gaming phenomenon before its collapse; and English-learning app ELSA, e-commerce enabler OnPoint and several fintech companies raised international venture capital on the premise of Vietnamese engineering serving Southeast Asian or global users. Their outbound “investment” barely registers in the statistics because it consists of code and cloud contracts rather than licensed capital transfers.
How does the Vietnamese state control who is allowed to invest abroad?
Through a licensing regime and foreign-exchange controls that treat outbound investment as a privilege. Every project above a modest threshold needs an outward-investment certificate from the Ministry of Finance, which absorbed the planning ministry in 2025, and larger or sensitive projects need prime-ministerial or National Assembly approval; the State Bank must then approve the transfer of capital.
The framework, set out in the 2020 Investment Law and its implementing decrees, requires the investor to show the source of funds, a bank commitment, and, for state-owned enterprises, approval from the owning ministry. Investment in certain sectors abroad, including banking, insurance, securities, real estate and media, requires additional conditions. Registered outbound investment has typically run at a few hundred million to around a billion dollars a year, a fraction of the $25 billion or more of inbound investment disbursed annually, and the cumulative registered total, roughly $22 billion over three decades, is dominated by Viettel, the state oil company and the agricultural ventures in Laos and Cambodia.
The state’s caution has a history. Petrovietnam’s overseas exploration arm PVEP lost money on projects in Venezuela, Peru and elsewhere in the 2000s and 2010s, and the losses became a political scandal that ended careers and led to prosecutions. Several state firms’ ventures in Laos and Cambodia, including in rubber and hydropower, disappointed. The result is that outbound investment by state enterprises is now scrutinised as a potential vector for capital loss and corruption, and even private firms face a process designed to catch mistakes rather than to enable speed.
For private companies the constraint is more often foreign exchange than licensing. Vietnam maintains capital controls, the dong is not freely convertible, and the State Bank rations foreign currency in periods of pressure on the exchange rate, as it did in 2022 and again in 2024 and 2025. A company that needs to inject dollars into a foreign subsidiary in a bad quarter may simply be unable to, which is one reason the successful outbound investors have either been state-connected or have generated foreign-currency revenue abroad that never needs to come home.
What could go wrong with Vietnam’s outbound ambitions?
Three things, each already visible: political and currency risk in frontier markets, brand and product risk in developed ones, and the domestic risk that founder-funded foreign losses eventually drain the home business. VinFast’s dependence on its founder, Viettel’s Cameroon and Myanmar entanglements and the exposure of TH Group in Russia are the current examples.
Frontier-market risk is the one Viettel has learned to price. Licence disputes, partner conflicts, currency collapse and coups have each hit at least one of its ten markets, and the company now treats a frontier telecom as an investment with a wide range of outcomes rather than a replica of Vietnam. Myanmar is the acute case: Mytel’s local partners are linked to the military, its network was targeted by resistance groups after 2021, and its ownership has drawn Western criticism that touches Viettel’s reputation elsewhere. Any Vietnamese company following Viettel into Africa or Latin America should assume that some markets will be lost entirely.
Developed-market risk is the VinFast lesson. A brand from an unknown origin, in a category where consumers are cautious and reviewers influential, faces costs of entry that a low-cost manufacturing base does not reduce. The company spent heavily on showrooms, marketing and a US plant before it had a product that could compete, and the money came from a founder and a conglomerate whose real-estate business was itself under pressure. The risk is not only that VinFast fails abroad but that the cost of the attempt destabilises Vingroup at home, a concern that Vietnamese regulators and bondholders have watched closely since 2023.
The third risk is macro. Vietnam runs a managed exchange rate, a thin foreign-currency cushion relative to its trade and a banking system with periodic liquidity stress. If a large outbound investor needed to fund heavy foreign losses in a period when the State Bank was defending the dong, the two objectives would collide, and the state would almost certainly choose the currency. The credit-rationing mechanism that would enforce that choice is described in the credit quota story.
What does the first outbound wave mean for founders, investors and operators?
That a Vietnamese company can go global, but only by exporting something specific. The winners so far have carried a cost advantage into services or a build-out capability into under-served markets; the expensive lessons have come from carrying a domestic brand or a founder’s conviction into markets that did not need either.
For founders, the practical implication is to choose the market by the advantage rather than the other way round. Japan needed engineers who would stay; Cambodia needed a network in the provinces; the United States needed a better electric car than Tesla at a lower price, which nobody had. The Vietnamese startups that have raised international capital, in education technology, games, fintech and enterprise software, are mostly following the FPT model at a smaller scale, selling engineering at Vietnamese cost into markets that pay developed-world prices, and it remains the highest-probability route out of the country.
For investors, the outbound record is a lens on governance. Viettel Global and FPT publish segment results by geography, which makes their foreign performance analysable; VinFast’s related-party sales and founder loans make its foreign performance difficult to separate from its domestic one. The gap in transparency is itself a signal about which expansion is built to be evaluated and which is built to be believed.
For operators of foreign companies in Vietnam, the outbound wave changes the competitive map in two ways. Vietnamese firms are now buyers of foreign assets, as Masan, FPT and Vinamilk have shown, and a well-run Vietnamese subsidiary or supplier may find its Vietnamese partner offering to acquire it. And the same trade agreements that opened Vietnam to foreign investors, examined in the EVFTA and CPTPP story, extend investment protections to Vietnamese firms going the other way, which the more sophisticated ones have begun to use. The next outbound wave will be larger than the first, and the question of whether it looks more like FPT or more like VinFast will be decided by how well its leaders learned from both.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Vietnamese companies have expanded internationally?
Viettel, with telecom operations in ten countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America; FPT, with software services clients in around 30 countries and Japan as its largest market; VinFast, with car sales and plants in the United States, India, Indonesia and elsewhere; and, on a smaller scale, Vinamilk, TH Group, Thaco, Masan, HoΓ ng Anh Gia Lai, Vietjet through its Thai joint venture, and several technology startups.
How much has Vietnam invested abroad?
Cumulative registered outbound investment stood at roughly $22 billion by 2025, according to official data, against more than $500 billion of registered inbound foreign investment over the same period. Annual outbound registrations have typically run from a few hundred million dollars to around a billion, dominated by Viettel, state energy companies and agricultural projects in Laos and Cambodia.
Is Viettel’s overseas business profitable?
In aggregate yes, according to Viettel Global’s reported results, which showed revenue on the order of $3 billion in 2024 and profits driven by Cambodia, Laos, Peru, Mozambique and Myanmar. Individual markets have lost money, notably Cameroon, where a partner dispute cost the company effective control, and Haiti, Burundi and Tanzania, where security problems and currency devaluation hurt dollar returns.
Why did VinFast retreat from the United States and Europe?
Because sales there fell far short of plan while losses ran at roughly $3 billion a year. Product reviews were poor, pricing was uncompetitive and the brand was unknown. From 2024 the company refocused on Vietnam, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and the Middle East, delayed its North Carolina plant to 2028 and relied on funding commitments from founder PhαΊ‘m NhαΊt Vượng.
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