Vietnam FDI Inflows 2024–2025: A Market Maturing and Reshaping
- Thuy Minh Giang
- 22 hours ago
- 7 min read
Vietnam's foreign direct investment story continues to evolve in ways that reward close reading. A comparison of the top-ten source countries for FDI projects in 2024 and 2025 reveals not just headline numbers, but a deeper shift in the quality, geography, and strategic intent of capital flowing into the country.
Executive Summary
Macro performance
Total disbursed FDI hit a five-year high of 27.62 billion USD in 2025, up 9% year on year
4,054 new projects were licensed, a 20% increase on 2024, though newly registered capital fell 12.2%, reflecting a shift toward smaller, more targeted deals
Singapore and China retained their positions as the top two source markets; both saw average deal sizes compress, pointing to a broader but less concentrated manufacturing wave
Standout development: Sweden's emergence
Sweden rose 59 places in the overall FDI rankings to finish fifth among all source countries, on the strength of just four projects worth a combined 1.0 billion USD
Its average project value of 255.1 million USD is the highest of any country in either year's data
The result is driven by Syre Impact AB's 1 billion USD polyester recycling complex in Binh Dinh province, backed by H&M Group, Volvo, and IKEA's parent foundation Ingka, with offtake and supply commitments from H&M and Nike
The project signals a qualitative shift: European capital is now targeting Vietnam as the preferred location for next-generation, ESG-aligned industrial production, not just low-cost assembly
Three structural trends for 2025
China's manufacturing footprint deepened further, with project numbers surging to 1,275 while average deal size fell to 4.1 million USD, reflecting high-volume, supply-chain-embedded investment
Korea's exit from the top ten and the entry of Sweden and the US signal a genuine diversification of Vietnam's investor base away from its traditional Northeast Asian concentration
The widening gap between project volume growth and registered capital growth suggests the era of megaproject pipelines is giving way to a denser, more distributed investment ecosystem, making Syre-scale outliers all the more significant when they appear
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The Big Picture: Same Leaders, Different Dynamics
Singapore retained the top spot in both years, but the contrast is striking. In 2024 Singapore committed 10.21 billion USD across 462 projects, averaging 22 million USD per project, reflecting a mix of large platform deals and mid-sized manufacturing moves. In 2025 Singapore's project count rose to 542, yet total FDI value fell to 7.0 billion USD, bringing the average project value down to just 12.9 million USD. That compression is not a sign of cooling confidence; rather it reflects that the pipeline of mega-deals has been partly absorbed, while a broader base of smaller, more nimble investments continues to flow in.
China's trajectory tells the opposite story. It jumped from 955 projects worth 4.73 billion USD in 2024 to a remarkable 1,275 projects in 2025, though at a lower FDI value of 5.2 billion USD and a sharply reduced average of 4.1 million USD per project. The volume surge underlines how deeply Chinese manufacturers have embedded themselves in Vietnam's supply chain (particularly in electronics, textiles, and components) as companies continue reshoring out of China proper and into Vietnam to serve export markets.
South Korea fell out of the top ten in 2025 by the metric shown here, a notable shift given its dominant presence through Samsung and the broader electronics ecosystem. Meanwhile Hong Kong held steady in third place on FDI value in both years, functioning as a conduit for capital with diverse ultimate origins.
The Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands remain present in both years, their modest project counts but comparatively high average project values (307 million USD and 34 million USD respectively in 2024) reflecting offshore holding structures rather than direct operational investment. Their continued appearance is a reminder that Vietnam's FDI figures blend genuine greenfield commitment with financial engineering routed through familiar offshore centres.
Sweden: The Story of the Year
No entrant in the 2025 table demands more attention than Sweden. With just four projects, Sweden posted 1.0 billion USD in FDI value and a staggering average project value of 255.1 million USD, by far the highest of any country in either year's ranking. In 2024 Sweden did not appear in the top ten at all. By the close of 2025 it had climbed 59 places in the overall rankings to finish fifth among all countries with newly licensed projects, behind only Singapore, China, Hong Kong, and Japan.
The explanation lies essentially in a single transformative project, though it carries implications well beyond its own balance sheet.
Syre Impact AB: Vietnam's Circular Textile Bet
The flagship investment is a 1 billion USD polyester recycling and production complex by Syre Impact AB, a Swedish green-tech company co-founded by H&M Group and technology investor Vargas. Authorities in Binh Dinh province formally granted the investment registration certificate in June 2025. The plant will occupy nearly 29 hectares in Zone A of Nhon Hoi Industrial Park and is designed to produce between 100,000 and 250,000 tonnes of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) pellets annually once operational, with a target completion date of 2028–2029.
Syre's model is chemical textile-to-textile recycling: a process that breaks down used polyester garments into their base monomers, which can then be reconstituted into virgin-quality recycled fibre. The company's stated ambition is to position Vietnam as "the first global centre for circular garments," and the Binh Dinh facility represents its first gigascale plant outside the United States.
The strategic logic is compelling. Vietnam is already one of the world's largest garment and textile exporters, and it is Nike's single largest manufacturing base, accounting for 51% of Nike's global footwear output and 31% of its apparel in fiscal year 2025. Syre has secured a seven-year, 600 million USD offtake agreement with H&M Group and, notably, a supply partnership with Nike, under which Nike will integrate Syre's recycled polyester into core product lines. Volvo and IKEA's parent foundation Ingka are also investors in Syre, meaning several of Sweden's most iconic brands are bound together in this single Vietnamese venture.
The project aligns squarely with Vietnam's national commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and with the ESG-driven procurement requirements increasingly imposed by European and American apparel brands on their supply chains.
A Broader Nordic Wave
Syre alone accounts for most of Sweden's 2025 FDI figure, but the investment reflects a wider Nordic trend. According to the Vietnamese Trade Office in Sweden, there is a clear pattern of Nordic capital (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) gravitating toward Vietnam in sectors aligned with green transition and sustainable manufacturing. Denmark's Ørsted, Vestas, and COWI have been expanding presence in offshore wind power, logistics infrastructure, and sustainable development. The broader shift is being driven by post-COVID supply chain restructuring combined with the ESG standards that Northern European investors are required to honour.
Vietnam, for its part, has been an active counterpart: Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh's European engagements in 2025 brought renewed commitments from Ericsson, Siemens, and other European technology companies. The EU–Vietnam Investment Protection Agreement, whose ratification Vietnam has actively lobbied for, would provide further institutional underpinning to this European investment turn.
Average Project Value
One of the most instructive dimensions of the data is average project value, which reveals the character of investment rather than just its volume.
In 2024, Caymen Islands entries averaged 307.88 million USD and Turkey 109.07 million USD, both driven by very few, very large deals. At the other end, China's 955 projects averaged just 4.96 million USD, characteristic of high-volume, lower-capital manufacturing and trading investments. Taiwan and Japan clustered around 11–13 million USD per project, consistent with mid-tier manufacturing expansions.
In 2025, Sweden's 255.1 million USD average towers over all others, followed by the Cayman Islands at 88.5 million USD and British Virgin Islands at 19.7 million USD. China remains at the low end with 4.1 million USD. Japan held relatively steady at 10.4 million USD. These figures suggest that while the volume of investment projects continues to grow (particularly from China), the largest single-project commitments are now coming from Western and offshore-routed sources, with Sweden's Syre deal setting a new benchmark for European greenfield ambition in Vietnam.
Structural Observations for 2025
Several themes emerge from the year-on-year comparison:
Manufacturing and processing dominated both years, accounting for more than 56% of newly registered FDI value in 2025 and reflecting Vietnam's continued role as Asia's preferred alternative assembly base for electronics, garments, and components.
Total FDI disbursement hit a five-year high of 27.62 billion USD in 2025, up 9% year on year, signalling that previously committed capital is actually being deployed on the ground, not merely pledged on paper. That is the more telling metric for real economic impact.
The number of new projects grew faster than their total value. Some 4,054 new projects were licensed in 2025, up 20.1%, while newly registered capital fell 12.2%. The implication is a shift toward smaller, more targeted investments, with the notable exception of headline deals like Syre's.
Regional diversification is broadening Vietnam's investor base. The US, Sweden, and British Virgin Islands all appear in the 2025 top ten, while Korea dropped out, illustrating that the country is no longer as dependent on a narrow band of Northeast Asian investors as it was a decade ago.
Conclusion
The 2024–2025 FDI data captures Vietnam at an inflection point. The country continues to absorb enormous volumes of Chinese and Singaporean capital into manufacturing, while simultaneously attracting a qualitatively different tier of European investment focused on green technology, circular economy, and ESG-compliant production.
Sweden's emergence, anchored by Syre's billion-dollar bet on circular textile manufacturing, is the single most striking development in the table. It represents not just one company's confidence in Vietnam, but a coalition of globally recognised brands (H&M, Volvo, IKEA, Nike) aligning around Vietnam as the preferred location for the next generation of sustainable industrial production. If Syre's plant performs as intended, it will likely catalyse further Nordic and European investment in Vietnam's green manufacturing corridor for years to come.
Data sourced from the Vietnamese Foreign Investment Agency (Ministry of Finance). Article prepared February 2026.
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