A plunge in capital going into mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals reduced foreign investment inflows in Vietnam in the first four months of this year.

Foreign investment inflow in M&A deal plunged in first four months.

According to statistics published by the Foreign Investment Agency under the Ministry of Planning and Investment, in the first four months, Vietnam lured in US$12.33 billion from foreign financiers, equalling 84.5% of the figure last year in spite of rising newly-registered and added capital.

Notably, foreign investors poured US$6.78 billion into 984 newly-registered projects, down 9.1% in the number of projects but up 26.9% in capital. A large part of this came from the US$4 billion Bac Lieu LNG-to-power project which single-handedly raised the average project scale from US$4.9 million in 2019 to US$6.9 million this year.

In addition, US$3.07 billion of capital was added to 335 existing projects, up 45.6% on-year.

Furthermore, there were 3,210 M&A deals with the total capital of US$2.48 billion, up 32.9% in number but only 34.7% of last year's capital. The deal scale averaged at US$770,000 only. Besides, M&A deals only made up 20.1% of the total capital while it was 48.9% last year.

Almost half (48.4%) of the foreign capital (US$6 billion) was poured into the manufacturing and processing sector. The runner up was the power generation and distribution sector with US$3.9 billion, making up 31.9%.

Foreign investors poured capital into 57 cities and provinces across the country. Bac Lieu became the locality receiving the largest FDI inflows thanks to the Bac Lieu LNG project.

Among the 93 countries and territories investing in Vietnam, Singapore was the largest with a total of US$5.07 billion, making up 41.1% of the total. The runners-up are mainland China, Taiwan (China), and the Republic of Korea.