Vietnam’s new rulebook for high-tech parks took effect on July 1, 2026, and it makes one specific promise: incentives now follow innovation, not the size of an investor’s checkbook. Vietnam’s new high technology and strategic technology regulations came into force that day alongside Decree No. 260/2026/ND-CP, which replaces Decree No. 10/2024/ND-CP, which governed high-tech parks in Vietnam.
The decree tightens who gets in. It leans harder on research spending, strategic technology, environmental performance and workforce quality than the rules it replaces. But the fine print inside Decree 260, and the money already moving through Vietnam’s parks this year, describe a narrower story than the one being sold to investors.
Article 26 Sets a Five-Part Entrance Exam
Every project seeking space in a Vietnamese high-tech park now has to clear the same baseline test before any sector-specific rules even apply. Under Article 26 of Decree 260, projects must show they:
- Align with the development objectives of the relevant high-tech park
- Apply environmentally friendly and energy-efficient technologies
- Match the park’s infrastructure planning and capacity
- Demonstrate sufficient financial resources and technological capability to implement projects on schedule
- Deliver relatively high investment intensity compared with other projects in the same functional zone
Clear that list and a project still has to satisfy separate criteria depending on whether it is research, advanced manufacturing, incubation, technology services or education and training. In exchange, qualified projects keep the incentives Vietnam has offered park tenants for years: preferential tax and land terms, one-stop administrative support across registration, environmental and customs procedures, and government help with hiring. The decree also lets provincial governments layer on their own extra support based on local budgets and priorities, which means the incentive package an investor gets can now vary meaningfully by province.
The Bigger the Project, the Softer the Bar
Here is where the rhetoric and the mechanics start to pull apart. Decree 260 gives an explicit break to scale: large projects meeting specified investment or revenue thresholds benefit from lower R&D expenditure and staffing ratios, recognising economies of scale while maintaining innovation requirements. Smaller projects get no such relief.
That logic did not appear out of nowhere. Vietnam has used a size-tiered R&D formula for high-tech enterprise status since 2021’s Decision 10, and the numbers show exactly how steep the curve gets. Firms with at least VND 6,000 billion in capital and 3,000 employees only need to spend 0.5 percent of net revenue on R&D. Mid-sized firms need 1 percent. Everyone smaller needs 2 percent, four times the burden carried by the giants.
A separate program shows the same pattern at an even bigger scale. Vietnam’s Investment Support Fund, created under a 2024 decree, hands out direct cash grants rather than tax breaks, but only to projects that clear a much higher bar.
| Program | Threshold for the Easier Path | What Smaller Projects Face |
|---|---|---|
| High-tech enterprise R&D ratio (2021 framework) | VND 6,000 billion (about $260 million) capital and 3,000+ staff: R&D at 0.5% of net revenue | Below VND 100 billion capital and 200 staff: R&D at 2% of net revenue |
| Investment Support Fund cash grants (2024 decree) | at least $470 million in capital or $790 million in annual revenue | No grant access unless hiring 300+ Vietnamese engineers as a chip designer |
| Strategic technology enterprise, 10% tax rate for 25 years | Domestic capital contribution of 51% or more, absent a special waiver | Majority foreign-owned projects need Prime Minister approval to qualify |
| Decree 260 high-tech park projects | Meeting unspecified investment or revenue thresholds unlocks lower R&D and staffing ratios | Everyone else meets the full ratio inside their functional zone |
The strategic technology row matters on its own. Vietnam’s rules for that top tier, which carries a 10 percent corporate income tax rate for 25 years, generally require a domestic investor to hold 51 percent or more of the enterprise, unless the Prime Minister grants an exception to land a critical technology. A wholly foreign-owned project cannot assume it qualifies for the best tier without either a local partner or a personal sign-off from Hanoi.
Samsung Is Living Proof of Who Clears It
If Decree 260 wanted a poster child for the kind of project it is chasing, Samsung already fits the part. The South Korean company has committed more than $24 billion in Vietnam through 2025 and told the country’s finance minister it plans to add another $1 billion this year.
- $24 billion: Samsung’s cumulative investment in Vietnam through the end of 2025
- $60 billion-plus: annual revenue generated by Samsung’s Vietnam operations, which run six manufacturing plants, an R&D center and a sales entity
- $4.08 billion: the Samsung Vietnam Semiconductor project licensed in Thai Nguyen this year, covering memory chip packaging and testing for DRAM and NAND lines
- $1.5 billion: a separate chip testing plant Reuters reported Samsung is building, its first in the country, in an industrial park 60 kilometers north of Hanoi
Construction on that testing plant is already underway, with operations expected to start in November 2027. Reuters reporters who visited the site described heavy machinery and workers on the ground, and a security guard confirmed a Samsung semiconductor plant was going up there. Vietnam’s back-end chip sector, the assembly, packaging and testing work that is less technically demanding than fabrication, also hosts Intel, Amkor Technology and Hana Micron.
Two Megaprojects Carried Two-Thirds of a Month’s Money
Vietnam’s own first-quarter data backs up the pattern. Total registered FDI hit $15.2 billion in the first three months of 2026, up 42.9 percent from a year earlier. In March alone, registered FDI reached over $9.1 billion, and two projects, the Samsung Vietnam Semiconductor plant and the $2.2 billion Quynh Lap LNG power plant, accounted for more than two-thirds of that month’s total.
The Samsung project alone pushed Thai Nguyen province’s first-quarter FDI to $5.72 billion, the highest of any province, and helped Singapore overtake South Korea as Vietnam’s top source of foreign capital for the quarter, $5.32 billion against $3.68 billion.
The continued attraction of large-scale, high-tech projects points to improving FDI quality.
Vietnam’s Foreign Investment Agency said that in its first-quarter assessment, crediting Samsung’s semiconductor project for the country’s growing pull in high-value segments. But the agency also flagged the flip side: strip out those two projects and quarterly growth would have looked far softer, since most projects moving through Vietnam’s pipeline remain small or medium in size.
Why Are Local Suppliers Still Stuck at the Bottom?
Vietnamese suppliers still capture only a sliver of the value inside the FDI-driven electronics sector that Decree 260 is meant to deepen. Foreign-invested firms produce nearly all of the exports, domestic localization sits in the single digits, and the government is now trying to force that number up through the same policy architecture that favors big incoming capital.
Foreign-invested firms account for around 98 percent of Vietnam’s electronics exports, and the domestic localization rate sits at just 5 to 10 percent. Samsung alone now sources from 340 domestic enterprises, including 39 tier-one suppliers, but most of those Vietnamese firms are limited to consumables, packaging and printing materials rather than core components. Nearly half of electronics employers, 47 percent, say they struggle to find experienced workers, and 42 percent report shortages even in basic skills.
The government’s own target, 10 to 15 percent value added in electronics and semiconductors by 2030, is an admission of how far behind domestic suppliers still sit. Decree 260 asks projects to prove technology transfer and commercialization pathways, but the suppliers who would receive that transfer are mostly SMEs without the capital or scale that the incentive tiers reward.
Vietnam Has Run This Playbook Before
This is not improvised. Decree 260 lands inside a much larger reset of Vietnam’s investment rules that Hanoi has been building since late 2025. The country’s Politburo issued Resolution No. 10-NQ/TW on June 8, 2026, a foreign investment framework that explicitly shifts the goal from the amount of capital coming in to its quality and its links to the domestic economy.
That resolution sets specific national targets: $200 billion to $300 billion in newly registered investment, a 30 percent rise in Fortune 500 companies investing in Vietnam, at least three world-leading technology companies opening headquarters or research centers, local content reaching 45 to 50 percent in key industries, and roughly 10,000 domestic companies, 500 to 1,000 of them top-tier suppliers, built into foreign investors’ supply chains by the target date. By 2045, Hanoi wants the foreign-invested sector to reach about 30 percent of GDP, up from around 20 percent today.
The timing lines up with another milestone. Vietnam’s gross national income per capita rose from $4,490 in 2024 to $4,970 in 2025, pushing the World Bank to reclassify the country into the upper-middle-income group this year. Research published in The Economic and Labour Relations Review has already documented how deeply one company can shape this system: Samsung’s dominant position inside Vietnam’s industrial parks reduced the competition for workers that it once faced in China, and helped it build a close working relationship with national and provincial governments. Decree 260 does not break that pattern. It writes the pattern into law for every park in the country.
What Existing Investors Must Do Before Licenses Lapse
Decree 260 also rewrites how projects get certified when they do not need full investment policy approval or an Investment Registration Certificate. Investors now submit a dossier explaining how their project meets the eligibility rules, with written commitments on implementation, technology standards, labor and environmental compliance. The park’s management board coordinates with provincial authorities and has to finish its review within set timelines.
Those commitments are not just paperwork. They become the basis for future inspections, and a project that fails to deliver on them can face compliance action under Vietnam’s investment laws. That raises the cost of overpromising in a dossier just to win a lower R&D ratio.
- What we know: existing investment licenses, registration certificates and high-tech enterprise certifications stay valid until they expire, and current land lease arrangements remain valid in certain circumstances.
- What’s unconfirmed: how large a gap will open between provinces, since Decree 260 leaves the size of any extra local incentive entirely to each province’s own budget and priorities.
Any modification tied to high-tech or strategic technology activity has to meet the new criteria regardless of when the original project was licensed, and annual land rental incentives may shift onto the new framework once the decree takes hold. Provinces can now stack their own incentives on top of Hanoi’s, adding one more variable for investors already weighing R&D ratios, localization rates and commercialization plans before they even pick a site.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Is Decree 260 Different From Vietnam’s Investment Support Fund?
Decree 260 sets the eligibility rules for tax and land incentives inside high-tech parks specifically. The Investment Support Fund is a separate program created under a 2024 decree that pays direct cash grants, but only to projects with at least $470 million in capital or $790 million in annual revenue, unless the project is a microchip design operation employing at least 300 Vietnamese engineers and training 30 more each year.
Can a Foreign-Owned Company Qualify as a Strategic Technology Enterprise?
Generally, no, not without a local partner. Strategic technology enterprise status, which carries a 10 percent corporate income tax rate for 25 years, requires a domestic investor to hold 51 percent or more of the enterprise’s capital, except in special cases the Prime Minister approves to attract critical strategic technologies.
Which Vietnamese Province Attracted the Most High-Tech Investment in 2026?
Thai Nguyen, a province north of Hanoi, led all of Vietnam in first-quarter 2026 FDI with $5.72 billion, driven almost entirely by Samsung’s semiconductor packaging and testing project there.
How Many Vietnamese Suppliers Does the Government Want Inside Global Tech Supply Chains?
Vietnam’s Resolution No. 10-NQ/TW, issued in June 2026, targets roughly 10,000 domestic companies feeding into foreign investors’ supply chains, with 500 to 1,000 of them reaching top-tier supplier status.
When Was the Decree That Decree 260 Replaces First Issued?
Decree 260 replaces Decree No. 10/2024/ND-CP, which had governed high-tech parks in Vietnam since it was issued in February 2024, before being further detailed through a 2024 implementing circular.
