Manufacturing in Vietnam

Manufacturing in Vietnam after reunification followed a pattern that was initially the reverse of the record in agriculture; it showed recovery from a depressed base in the early postwar years.

However, this recovery stopped in the late 1970s as the war in Cambodia and the threat from China caused the government to redirect food, finance, and other resources to the military.

[1] National leadership objectives during the immediate postwar period included consolidating the Northern factories and workshops that had been scattered and hidden during the war to improve their chances of survival and nationalizing banks and significant factories in the South to bring the financial and industrial sectors under state control.

Additional pragmatic steps were also considered, such as adopting incentive-structured wages and realigning prices to reflect production costs better.

This was partly because it ran counter to the overriding policy of socializing the South and integrating it with the North by reducing the centralized administrative control needed to do the job.

By 1980 the Vietnamese press reported that many grain, food-product, and consumer-goods processing enterprises had reduced production or ceased operations entirely.

Although detailed statistics on sector performance were insufficient to show annual results, the total value of light industry output peaked in 1978; by 1980, it was nearly 3 percent lower than in 1976.

Increasingly severe shortages of food (particularly grain and fish) and industrial consumer goods lessened workers' incentives.

Chemical fertilizer production continued to exceed the 1975 level and, in 1985, reached 516,000 tons despite relatively underdeveloped mining and enrichment processes for apatite and pyrite ore and underutilization of the Lam Thao Superphosphate of Lime plant (Vinh Phu Province).

[5] In 2017, Vingroup started VINFAST Automobile Production Complex project in Dinh Vu - Cat Hai Economic Zone.