Практика Shadowing: Why Vietnam’s Economic Boom Is So Fragile | Economy of Vietnam | Econ - Изучайте разговорный английский по видео
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This is Vietnam, one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
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Fifty years ago, the last Americans were evacuated from Saigon, leaving behind a war-ravaged and impoverished country.
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Today, Saigon is Ho Chi Minh City, is a metropolis of over nine million people.
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Skycrapers, global brands, endless construction.
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In just a few decades, Vietnam has eliminated extreme poverty, become one of the top exporters to the United States
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and turned itself into a manufacturing hub for companies like Apple and Samsung.
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It all began in the 1980s with the Joy Moy reforms,
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opening the economy to trade and private enterprise with cheap labor and political stability.
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Since then, Vietnam has attracted over $230 billion in foreign investment and become an electronics assembly powerhouse.
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Chinese, Japanese, South Korean and Western firms, all building factories here.
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Over the past decade, its economy has grown faster than that of any Asian country bar China.
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In 2025, the economy grew over 8%.
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Trade crossed $900 billion.
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On paper, everything looks perfect, but something doesn't add up.
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Because while the economy is growing fast, its electricity use is slowing down.
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For years, power demand in Vietnam grew even faster than GDP.
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But in 2025, GDP grew over 8%, while electricity output rose just 4.9%, less than half the pace.
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And in an industrial economy, that shouldn't happen.
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Vietnam looks like a manufacturing powerhouse, but it doesn't behave like one.
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In a normal industrial economy, more factories means more energy.
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More production means more power.
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Growth and electricity move together, but in Vietnam, they're starting to move apart.
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Which suggests something unusual, that this growth might not be as deep as it looks.
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So what's actually happening inside the economy?
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Where is this growth really coming from?
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And more importantly, how strong is it really?
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To understand what's happening, you first need to understand how Vietnam's growth model works.
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At its core, the system is surprisingly simple.
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Foreign companies bring the capital, they build factories, they import components from across Asia.
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Screens, chips, circuit boards, machinery.
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Those parts arrive in Vietnam, where they're assembled by a large and relatively cheap workforce.
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The finished products are then exported to the rest of the world, especially to the United States and Europe.
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Vietnam doesn't design most of these products, and it doesn't manufacture many of the complex components either.
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Instead, it specializes in the final stage of the supply chain, assembly.
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And this model has worked extremely well.
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Global companies get lower costs.
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Vietnam gets jobs, investment, and export growth.
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It's one of the reasons multinational firms have poured more than $200 billion into the country over the past two decades.
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And as tensions between China and the West increased, Vietnam became even more attractive.
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For many companies, it became the perfect backup plan.
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An alternative manufacturing base just outside China.
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This strategy is often called China plus one, and Vietnam became its biggest beneficiary.
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factories moved in, exports exploded, the economy surged.
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But this model also creates a hidden weakness.
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Because when most of your growth comes from assembling products designed and supplied elsewhere, the value created inside the country is actually quite small,
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which means the economy can grow very quickly, without deeply transforming the domestic economy.
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And that's where the real story begins.
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Vietnam's boom is not happening evenly across the economy.
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Instead, it is split into two very different worlds.
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On one side, there are the foreign companies.
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Samsung, Apple supplier, large multinational manufacturers.
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These firms dominate Vietnam's export sector.
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Today, foreign-invested companies generate roughly three-quarters of the country's total exports.
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They run the largest factories.
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They control the global supply chains, and they capture most of the gains from the export boom.
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But on the other side, there are domestic Vietnamese companies, and their story looks very different.
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While exports from foreign firms surged, exports from domestic companies actually declined in 2025.
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In other words, the country's exports are booming, but many local businesses are not.
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This creates what economists sometimes call a two-track economy.
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One track is fast, global, and foreign-owned.
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The other is slower, domestic, and struggling to keep up.
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And that makes Vietnam's growth far more fragile than it appears.
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This leads to another misconception about Vietnam's rise.
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Many people see Vietnam as a replacement for China.
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As companies tried to reduce their dependence on Chinese manufacturing, they began shifting production to other countries, and Vietnam quickly became the biggest winner.
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But the reality is more complicated, because Vietnam may be producing the final products, yet it still depends heavily on China for the parts.
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Most of the components used in Vietnamese factories — chips, displays, machinery, industrial materials — are imported from abroad,
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and the vast majority of those imports come from China.
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In fact, Vietnam's trade deficit with China has exploded in recent years.
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In 2025 alone, the country imported around $186 billion worth of goods from China,
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creating a deficit of more than $115 billion, which reveals the real structure of the system.
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China produces the high-value components.
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Those parts are shipped across the border into Vietnam.
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Vietnam assembles the final product, And the finished goods are exported to the United States and Europe.
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In other words, Vietnam is not replacing China in the global supply chain.
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It is extending it.
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And that means Vietnam's growth still depends heavily on the same country it is supposedly replacing.
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While foreign companies dominate exports, a handful of giant conglomerates dominate everything else.
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Groups like Bing Group, Masan, and Hoa Phat.
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These companies are not just large businesses.
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They shape entire industries, real estate, steel, retail, infrastructure, and technology.
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Take Vingroup.
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It started as a real estate developer, but today its empire stretches across shopping malls,
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hospitals, universities, electric vehicles, and massive infrastructure projects.
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In many ways, these conglomerates function almost like mini economies of their own, and their influence is especially visible in Vietnam's stock market.
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In 2025, the country's main stock index surged more than 40%, but most of those gains came from just a handful of companies,
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many of them tied to Vingroup.
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At one point, stocks connected to the Vingroup ecosystem accounted for the majority of the market's rise, which creates a strange illusion.
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From the outside, the stock market appears to be booming, but underneath, much of that growth is concentrated in a very small number of firms
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and the risks don't stop there because these conglomerates are now entering the most expensive phase of their expansion.
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Building steel complexes, launching electric vehicle companies, even proposing massive infrastructure projects worth tens of billions of dollars.
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To finance this growth many of them rely heavily on borrowing.
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Which means that if one of these companies runs into trouble, the shock could quickly spread through banks, markets, and the wider economy like China Evergrande crisis.
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And that's what makes this concentration so dangerous.
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Because when too much of an economy depends on just a few companies, their success becomes everyone's success.
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But their failure can become everyone's problem.
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Over the last decade, Vietnam has been driven by bank-dependent economic development.
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That means Vietnam's banks have been lending aggressively.
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By the end of 2025, total credit in the economy had grown by nearly 19% in a single year.
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That pushed Vietnam's credit-to-GDP ratio to around 146%.
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For a lower-middle-income country, that is an unusually high number.
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But the real issue isn't just the size of the debt, it's where that money's going.
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A large share of the loans flowing through Vietnam's banking system are tied to real estate developers and the large conglomerates.
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Many of the same companies are driving the country's rapid expansion.
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For years, cheap credit helped fuel a construction boom.
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Even massive prestige projects like Dong Son Bronze Drum Stadium,
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a proposed 135,000-seat sports complex named after the prehistoric bronze casters.
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The project is being developed by Vingroup, the country's most powerful conglomerate.
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But rapid credit growth always carries a risk.
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Because when borrowing expands faster than the real economy, financial vulnerabilities start to build.
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And there are already signs of strain.
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Non-performing loans in Vietnam's banking system have been rising in recent years.
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Much of that pressure is linked to property developers struggling with high debt and delayed projects, which creates a dangerous feedback loop.
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Banks lend heavily to developers.
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Developers rely on rising property values, and property serves as collateral for many of those loans,
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which means Vietnam's growth is not just dependent on exports and foreign investment,
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but is also deeply tied to the stability of its financial system.
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But the most immediate threat to Vietnam's growth is much simpler.
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Electricity.
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Over the past decade, the country's industrial boom has pushed electricity demand.
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Manufacturing zones in the north, where many of the electronics factories operate, are especially energy intensive.
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The World Bank estimated that the 2023 power crisis caused losses of US$1.4 billion,
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equal to 0.3% of Vietnam's GDP.
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Semiconductor production, which demands intensive electricity usage, was especially vulnerable.
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In the past, manufacturers have been asked to adjust schedules to conserve power in their region.
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But building new power plants and transmission lines takes years.
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And in Vietnam, many of those projects have been delayed.
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Some are stuck in regulatory disputes, others are waiting for financing.
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More than a hundred renewable energy projects remain stalled, unable to connect to the national grid.
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At the same time, the state electricity company still controls power prices.
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Those price caps make it difficult for private investors to earn a return, which slows the construction of new power plants even further.
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The result is a system that is increasingly stretched.
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For a country whose economic rise depends heavily on manufacturing, reliable power is not a luxury.
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It is the foundation of the entire model.
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Without it, the factories slow, export stall, and the growth story that has defined Vietnam for decades begins to look far more fragile.
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Vietnam's leadership is well aware of these risks.
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And over the past few years, the government has begun trying to address them.
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At the centre of this effort is the country's new leader, General Secretary Tho Lam.
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After years as Vietnam's powerful Minister of Public Security, Do Lam rose to the top of the Communist Party
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and is now leading an ambitious push to reshape the country's economic model.
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His goal is simple, to move Vietnam beyond low-value manufacturing and turn it into a more advanced economy,
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one that designs technology, builds stronger domestic companies, and produces more of its own industrial components.
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In theory, this could help Vietnam move up the global value chain.
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But reforming an economic system this large is never easy.
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Vietnam's rapid growth was built on cheap labor, foreign investment, and a tightly controlled political system.
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Changing that model requires difficult trade-offs.
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Too much regulation can scare away foreign investors.
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Too little reform can leave domestic firms permanently behind.
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And all of this is happening while Vietnam navigates a delicate geopolitical balancing Act, deeply tied to Chinese supply chains,
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yet heavily dependent on American and European markets for exports.
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Vietnam now stands at exactly this crossroads.
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Its export model has lifted millions out of poverty and turned the country into one of Asia's fastest-growing economies.
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But the same model also creates deep structural dependencies.
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From the outside, Vietnam's rise looks unstoppable.
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A country once devastated by war has transformed itself into a major player in global manufacturing.
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Factories stretch across the countryside.
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Exports reach every corner of the world.
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And growth continues to surprise economists.
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But underneath this success, the system remains fragile.
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Much of the economy is driven by foreign companies.
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Domestic firms struggle to keep pace.
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Debt is rising.
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Energy infrastructure is under strain and the country remains deeply embedded in global supply chains it does not fully control.
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For now, the model still works.
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Investment continues to flow, factories continue to expand, and Vietnam remains one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
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But the next phase of development will be far more difficult than the last, because the challenge ahead is not simply to grow, it is to transform.
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and whether Vietnam can make that transition may determine the future of its economic miracle.
Контекст и фон
В этом видео рассматривается экономический подъем Вьетнама в последние десятилетия, что делает его одной из самых быстрорастущих экономик мира. Спикер делится историей о том, как страна, пережившая войну и нищету, сумела стать важным игроком на мировом рынке, особенно в производственном секторе. Однако этот рост имеет свои уязвимости. Важно отметить, что несмотря на высокие темпы роста экономики, существует угроза, быстрая экономическая экспансия может обернуться проблемами, поскольку зависимость от иностранных инвестиции и ресурсов остается значительной.
Топ-5 фраз для повседневного общения
- Вьетнам стал одним из крупнейших экспортеров в США.
- Система экономики довольно проста и зависит от иностранных компаний.
- Экспортные объемы иностранных компаний резко возросли.
- Местные предприятия борются за выживание.
- Концентрация на больших конгломератах может привести к рискам для всей экономики.
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