Site readiness, not incentives: the playbook behind Vietnam's surprise FDI champion

Bac Ninh is a small province about 30 kilometres northeast of Hanoi, a fraction of the size of Ho Chi Minh City or the capital. In 2025 it ranked second in the country for foreign direct investment, behind only Ho Chi Minh City, pulling in roughly $20 billion in total registered investment, of which $5.73 billion was FDI, and registering 7,686 new enterprises along the way. For a place with no port of its own and no metropolitan labour market, that is a striking result — and it did not come from being the cheapest or the biggest.

What Bac Ninh sells is readiness. The province has productised its offer around what officials call a five-part 'ready' policy: ready land, ready infrastructure, ready workforce, ready administrative reform, and ready business support. In practice that means industrial land that is already cleared and titled, power and water run to the fence, road links to the northern ports, training pipelines tied to named investors, permits pushed through a digital one-stop, and an aftercare function that stays with the investor after the ribbon is cut. None of it is exotic. The discipline is in having it all in place before the investor asks.

An anchor turned that discipline into a cluster. Samsung's vast electronics complex pulled in a supplier ecosystem — Canon, Amkor, Foxconn, Goertek, Sunwoda, Amphenol — and the province now hosts 3,396 FDI projects worth $46.8 billion from investors in 42 countries, heavily concentrated in electronics and components. This is the compounding logic of readiness: each ready site that fills lowers the perceived risk for the next firm, and a marquee anchor does much of the recruiting that a brochure cannot.

Bac Ninh is the sharp end of a national pattern worth naming. Vietnam's realised, or disbursed, FDI reached $27.62 billion in 2025 — a five-year high, up 9% — even as newly registered capital was nearly flat at $38.42 billion, a rise of just 0.5%. That gap is the whole point. In a year when UNCTAD warned that global FDI headlines are inflated by money passing through financial centres rather than landing in factories, Vietnam is converting pledges into poured concrete, and provinces like Bac Ninh are the conversion engine.

The model is not frictionless, and pretending otherwise would mislead. Land clearance is contentious, the electronics concentration is a real exposure if a single anchor retools, and wage and skills pressure builds as occupancy climbs. Bac Ninh's own 2026-30 plan is candid about the bottlenecks it must keep clearing — site clearance, infrastructure, and 'human resource quality' — while it targets $5.5 billion in FDI for 2026 and pushes industrial-land occupancy higher. Readiness is a treadmill, not a finish line; the work is keeping the next tranche of land, power and workers ahead of demand.

For the practitioners Doyen serves — economic developers, IPA officers and trade staff anywhere — the lesson is not 'be Vietnam.' It is that the unit of competition has shifted from the incentive package to the readiness package. The agency that can hand an investor cleared land, a firm power-connection date, a trained-workforce commitment and a permit timeline measured in days will beat the agency offering a fatter tax holiday on a site that is not ready to build. And once the anchor lands, disciplined aftercare turns it into your best recruiter.