Vietnam’s ports tripled their traffic. The roads behind them are only now catching up

Vietnam’s container ports handled 24.4 million twenty-foot equivalent units in 2024, three times the 8.0 million of 2013. Over the same period Thailand’s throughput grew by 42 percent and Indonesia’s by 32 percent. Vietnam overtook Indonesia in 2015 and is closing on Malaysia.¹

The ports reflect the shape of the economy. Trade in goods and services was equivalent to 190 percent of GDP in 2025, a higher ratio than Thailand’s or Malaysia’s and several times that of Indonesia.² An economy this open depends on moving goods between factory and quay cheaply and on time, which is where the land network has lagged.

For most of the past decade the road network trailed the ports. In 2020 Vietnam had 1,163 km of expressways in operation. By the end of 2025 it had 3,345 km of main routes open to traffic, together with 458 km of interchanges and connecting roads, and the North-South Expressway from Cao Bằng to Cà Mau had been completed.³ The government’s target of 3,000 km was exceeded.

Physical capacity has not yet translated into proportionate gains in logistics performance. Vietnam scored 3.3 on the World Bank’s 2023 Logistics Performance Index, a modest improvement on 2018, level with the Philippines and behind Malaysia at 3.6 and Thailand at 3.5.⁴ The index weighs customs, tracking and timeliness as well as infrastructure, which suggests that the next gains will come as much from how the network is operated as from how much of it is built.

The next projects are larger and longer-dated. In November 2024 the National Assembly approved the North-South high-speed railway: 1,541 km between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City through 20 provinces, designed for 350 km an hour, at an estimated cost of VND 1,713.5 trillion, about $67.6 billion. The government aims to complete it by 2035.⁵ Ground is now due to be broken by the end of 2026, with land clearance the main obstacle.⁶

Long Thanh International Airport, east of Ho Chi Minh City, is preparing for commercial operation in 2026. Its first phase is designed for 25 million passengers and 1.2 million tonnes of cargo a year, and the three phases together are estimated to cost more than $16 billion.⁷

$67.6B

Estimated cost of the North-South high-speed railway

1,541 km

Length of the line, from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City

25M

Annual passenger capacity of Long Thanh’s first phase

Transport needs for 2026-30 are estimated at almost $115 billion, more than the state budget is likely to cover.⁸ Public-private partnership is the intended bridge, and the record so far is mixed. Of 30 transport projects granted in-principle investment approval, worth about $49.9 billion in total, only 12 have reached a signed contract. Most depend on commercial banks whose loans carry high interest rates and short maturities.⁸

Of 30 transport projects approved in principle as partnerships, only 12 have reached a signed contract.

The state can contribute up to 70 percent of total investment in qualifying projects, which reduces the private share but not the need for long-dated finance for the remainder.⁸ In our view the binding constraint on the next phase is not engineering capacity, which the expressway programme has demonstrated, but the availability of debt with tenors that match the assets. That is a question for Vietnam’s financial system as much as for its ministries.