Manufacturing at Viet Competence Company (Photo: Thu Ha)

Vietnam aims to have about 1.5 million enterprises by 2025, including 60,000-70,000 medium and large-sized ones. The private sector’s contribution to GDP is expected to reach 55% while about 5-10 national brands will be transformed into international brands.

Such ambitious goals are set out as the position of Vietnam’s economy is increasingly improving on the global playing field. In 2022, Vietnam has seven entrepreneurs on Forbes magazine’s billionaire list. More and more enterprises are valued at billions of US dollars, attracting strong investment flows and modern international corporate management skills.

However, the Vietnamese business community is currently only big in quantity and is not yet high in quality. The country has about 850,000 active enterprises but 96% are small and medium ones. Over recent years, the private sector has recorded decent growth, contributing 40% of GDP and attracting 85% of the workforce, but it has the lowest productivity growth rate, compared to state-owned and foreign-invested enterprises.

Private enterprises’ technological capability, especially core technologies, remains limited while links between them are still weak. The majority of private enterprises have low levels of management, their human resources are small in both quantity and quality and their business mindset is short-sighted. In the meantime, state-owned enterprises, which own huge capital resources, are performing below their potential and fail to meet the role as the primary force of the economy.

In the current economic restructuring period, the burden is placed on the business community, which is required to grow in not only numbers but also in strength and competitiveness. If so, the Government needs to effectively implement measures to support businesses to recover in the aftermath of COVID-19. At the same time, it is necessary to strengthen connectivity between enterprises to form value chains and increase the effectiveness of state management on enterprise development.