Vietnam has recently launched a new wave of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reforms, with Prime Minister Luong Minh Tung signing a key document mandating that all ministries and local governments must approve five-year capital restructuring plans for their affiliated SOEs by the end of August.

Under the new regulations, SOEs are categorized by importance: enterprises vital to national interests will remain 100% state-owned; in critical sectors such as airports, aviation, large-scale mining, and banking, the state must maintain absolute control; in telecommunications and certain energy companies, the threshold is slightly lower, but the state still retains dominant influence.

As a result, hundreds of SOEs will initiate share restructuring, including major players in oil, power, and aviation. Some enterprises currently have excessively high state ownership stakes, leaving significant room for private capital to enter in the future.

The move aims to attract social capital, enhance SOE efficiency, and simultaneously enable the government to recover funds and accelerate infrastructure investment. After restructuring, some firms may go public, injecting new vitality into Vietnam’s stock market.

This marks the second round of SOE reforms this year. At the beginning of the year, the government had already required SOEs to divest non-core businesses, focusing resources on strategic sectors like energy, chemicals, and logistics. The underlying motivation stems from the urgent need for economic revitalization amid mounting pressure on growth rates.

Following this year’s leadership transition, the current leadership has accumulated strong political capital through a "crackdown on corruption," yet their positions remain far from fully consolidated. They urgently need impressive economic results to prove their capability.

However, external conditions are unfavorable: the United States is Vietnam’s largest export market, and recent tariff policies have directly hit exports; global energy volatility has also severely disrupted the logistics system reliant on road transport. Although macroeconomic indicators remained positive in the first few months, achieving ambitious annual growth targets remains a daunting challenge.

SOEs are seen as a key sector with untapped potential. These enterprises possess massive asset scales and make significant contributions to national finances, but they have long been hampered by rigid mechanisms and low profit margins, failing to unleash their full economic impact.

Yet implementing reform is no easy task. SOEs are managed under various ministries and local governments, entangled in complex factional interests. Some systems have strong execution capacity, while others may respond passively—especially fearing loss of control after equity dilution. Historical precedents exist: in earlier reform attempts, the actual completion rates for planned restructuring and divestments were disappointingly low.

Thus, the success of this round of reform hinges not on the documents themselves, but on whether authorities can transcend entrenched interest barriers and truly transform equity changes into substantive governance restructuring. Whether Vietnam’s leaders possess sufficient political leverage to drive this “deep-water” reform will be determined by the actual actions of SOEs over the coming years. For Vietnam, this is not merely about unlocking existing assets—it is also about securing its position in the next tier of global industrial reconfiguration.

Original source: toutiao.com/article/1874369926454283/

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