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Law 143/2025/QH15 is the umbrella Investment Law — the framework instrument under which Vietnam's sectoral incentive regimes (Decision 1018 semiconductor strategy, Decree 182 Investment Support Fund, Law on Digital Technology Industry, Law on Data, Law on AI) operate. The 2025 rewrite is the first full-replacement of the 2020 baseline since the post-COVID FDI surge made Vietnam the de-facto China+1 destination for North-Asian electronics capex.
Five structural changes:
Foreign investors may now incorporate a Vietnamese enterprise without first securing an Investment Registration Certificate (IRC) for a specific project. This unlocks structures previously bottlenecked by IRC procedure:
routing intra-group capital through Vietnam
Singapore-style "shelf company" pattern)
through subsidiaries
The change aligns Vietnam's entry pattern with Singapore and Malaysia, both of which historically permitted no-project incorporation.
A pre-vetted, expedited licensing track for projects sited in:
Law on Digital Technology Industry — already filed as 2025-06-14-vietnam-law-on-digital-technology-industry)
The SIP shortens the ground-breaking timeline by an estimated 9-12 months versus the conventional IRC + investment-policy approval route. Eligible project categories explicitly include large-scale data centres, cloud infrastructure, 5G and successor mobile networks, "other digital infrastructure in strategic technology sectors as designated by the Prime Minister", and the production of strategic-technology products — i.e. the SIP is designed around the same semiconductor / AI / digital-infrastructure sectors the 2024 Decision 1018 strategy and Decree 182 ISF target.
Appendix IV abolishes 38 conditional business sectors and adjusts the scope of 20 others. Notable removals: tax procedure services, customs brokerage, insurance auxiliary services, labour outsourcing, commercial appraisal, temporary import-re-export of frozen foods or used goods. From 1 July 2026 only 199 conditional sectors remain (down from 237). The cull is a deliberate FDI-friendliness signal in services and downstream manufacturing.
The National Assembly's investment-policy-approval prerogative is narrowed to projects with "special mechanisms"; ordinary mega-projects move to the Prime Minister or provincial People's Committee chairpersons. Article 24 of the 2025 law lists 20 specific project categories that require investment policy approval — a closed list, not the open-ended discretion of the 2020 regime.
Prior NA / PM project-policy approvals for outbound investment are eliminated. Operationalised by Decree 103/2026/ND-CP (paired with the inbound-FDI Decree 96/2026/ND-CP issued the same day, 31 March 2026).
This is the framework instrument under which every other Vietnamese investment incentive operates. It does not itself directly subsidise or restrict — but it sets the procedural and eligibility scaffolding for the Decision 1018 semiconductor strategy, the Decree 182 Investment Support Fund, and the Law on Digital Technology Industry. A 4 reflects:
(semiconductor / data-centre / 5G via the SIP zone list)
It is not 5 because the law itself does not appropriate funding or impose restrictive controls — those happen one tier down.
2024-09-21 Decision 1018 and 2024-12-31 Decree 182) gets a procedural accelerant: foreign electronics OEMs can now incorporate first, scout later, and use the SIP for ground-breaking.
Law on Digital Technology Industry (2025-06-14), is the legal vehicle for cluster-level data-centre and semiconductor-park subsidies.
private capital can now move offshore without NA/PM gating, mirroring the post-2024 capital-account loosening seen in other ASEAN reformers.
vehicle, though the FTSE upgrade catalyst (still pending) remains the larger near-term price driver.
projects vs. the more incremental ATMP/OSAT projects already announced? The decree text gives PMs and provincial chairs broad discretion — the binding constraint is implementation capacity at provincial level, not legal authority.
electronics groups as a re-routing layer? Vietnam's 2024 Law on Data and pending data-localisation regime will be the main check on this.
inbound regime — its detailed implementation rules (fee tiers, decision deadlines, post-licensing reporting) are where the speed-to-ground claims will be tested.