Starting a business in Vietnam: foreigner's guide (2026)

Vietnam's National Assembly enacted sweeping amendments introducing mandatory ultimate beneficial owner (UBO) disclosure at the point of registration — any individual holding ≥25% of charter capital or controlling key decisions must be named, with changes reported within 10 days. Decree 168/2025/NĐ-CP simultaneously replaced Decree 01/2021 as the primary registration implementing regulation, and corporate e-IDs replaced portal accounts as the sole accepted digital identity for online filings.

The annual government business-environment resolution for 2025 mandated elimination of 890 business conditions, abolition of 184 administrative procedures, and simplification of ~350–394 more, with a goal of cutting compliance costs by over 50% versus 2024 levels and growing new market entrants by 15–20% in 2026.

The key implementing decree for the 2020 Enterprise Law introduced a single enterprise ID number valid across all government agencies and definitively eliminated hard-copy submission requirements after any valid online filing, completing Vietnam's shift to a paperless registration process.

Vietnam's fourth-generation Enterprise Law and the revised Investment Law became effective simultaneously, abolishing the mandatory corporate-seal-specimen notification, enabling fully online registration without follow-up hard-copy submissions, removing minimum shareholding hold periods, and for the first time allowing sole proprietorships to convert directly into joint-stock companies.

Vietnam achieved its highest-ever Doing Business ranking at 70th out of 190 economies, with a Starting a Business sub-score of 85.1, reflecting the cumulative impact of the National Business Registration System rollout and the series of annual reform resolutions since 2014.

By 2018, the fully computerised NBRS — integrating business, tax, customs, statistics, and public-security registration across all 63 provinces in a one-stop-shop model — had cut average registration time from 15 days (2007) to 2.3 days and halved the registration fee to VND 100,000 per dossier.

The 2014 Enterprise Law took effect, strengthening minority-shareholder rights, expanding corporate governance requirements, and becoming the first enterprise law administered alongside a fully digital national registry; it served as the statutory backbone until superseded by the 2020 law.

The government initiated its landmark series of annual reform resolutions, benchmarking Vietnam against ASEAN's top performers on the number of procedures, time, and cost to start a business, and incorporating the Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) as a mandatory governance KPI for ministries and localities.

Vietnam's Ministry of Planning and Investment, with UNIDO, NORAD, and SECO funding, launched a multi-year technical-assistance project that built and deployed the National Business Registration System (NBRS), creating the single computerised platform that would eventually cover all 63 provinces and integrate tax, customs, and statistics registration.

Vietnam's National Assembly enacted the founding Enterprise Law, replacing the separate Law on Private Enterprises and Law on Companies with a single framework permitting citizens to register limited liability companies, shareholding companies, and partnerships for the first time; within three years registered enterprises doubled from ~40,000 to over 70,000.