Vietnam’s private sector has begun showing signs of recovery following Resolution 68.

According to the 2025 Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) report released by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI), more than one million businesses were operating nationwide by the end of 2025, up 6.6% compared to the previous year.

Together with around 6.1 million household businesses, the private sector currently provides jobs for approximately 26 million workers, accounting for more than half of total employment in the economy.

After a prolonged difficult period from 2023 to 2024, confidence within the business community is gradually returning.

In 2025, the number of newly registered businesses reached a record 297,500 enterprises, up 27.4% year-on-year.

As many as 85.7% of businesses said they had maintained or expanded operations.

Despite ongoing challenges, people continue launching businesses, expanding investments and searching for new opportunities, even as the global economy remains volatile.

If reforms are implemented effectively and carried through consistently, their impact will gradually become visible in businesses’ real-world operations.

Perhaps never before has Vietnam’s private economic sector carried such high expectations.

For the first time, Resolution 68 officially defines the private sector as “one of the most important driving forces of the national economy.”

The move signals that private enterprises are increasingly becoming a more important engine of Vietnam’s economic growth.

At the same time, businesses remain under significant pressure.

The 2025 PCI report revealed a striking shift.

For the first time in many years, Vietnamese businesses no longer view lack of capital as their biggest concern.

Instead, the greatest challenge has become finding customers.

Specifically, 60.2% of businesses said their biggest difficulty in 2025 was securing market demand for their products, a sharp rise from 45.3% the previous year.

Many businesses are no longer asking how much money they can borrow, but whether they can retain customers and orders in the coming months.

What is equally concerning is that while the number of new businesses has surged, the number exiting the market has also increased sharply.

During the 2016-2020 period, roughly one business closed for every two new businesses established.

Today, that ratio is approaching nearly one-to-one.

The market has become far more ruthless than before.

Businesses are opening quickly, but many are also shutting down just as fast.

Access to capital also reveals a clear contradiction within the economy.

According to the VCCI report, 75.5% of businesses said they could not obtain loans without collateral, while 93.5% of loans in Vietnam require secured assets - significantly higher than in many neighboring countries.

In many cases, land ownership certificates are still trusted more than business ideas.

That is why many Vietnamese technology startups often have to rely on self-financing for long periods before gaining access to meaningful investment capital.

Perhaps even more difficult is the ability to predict policy changes.

Only around 6-8% of businesses said they could regularly anticipate policy shifts, while more than half said they rely on social media to track draft legal documents.

For businesses, the greatest challenge is often not strict regulations themselves, but regulations that change too quickly or whose enforcement remains unpredictable.

Unofficial costs also remain a persistent issue.

Around 26% of businesses reported facing unofficial expenses when applying for business licenses - nearly three times the regional average.

Many small businesses say what worries them most is not a single large fee, but countless unnamed small payments that gradually push operating costs higher.

VCCI leaders summarized the mood of many businesses accurately: “The issue now is not a lack of policies, but how those policies are implemented so businesses can genuinely feel the changes.”

Businesses today do not simply need faster procedures.

They need a stable enough environment to confidently invest large sums and plan for the next several years.

According to VCCI, improvements in governance quality often take several years to materialize.

However, if reforms reach the implementation stage and are not interrupted midway, their impact will gradually appear in business operations.

The wave of optimism generated by Resolution 68 is currently more visible among large enterprises, while many small businesses and household businesses remain cautious.

One of the biggest gaps facing Vietnamese businesses today is still technology and management capacity.

Only around 8.8% of businesses reported introducing product or service innovation.

Many Vietnamese firms continue to grow in relatively manual ways.

Still, that gap also highlights significant room for growth if businesses can gain better access to technology, capital and markets in the years ahead.

Current technological shifts are creating new opportunities that even smaller businesses can participate in.

At the same time, many Vietnamese companies are still run under owner-manager models.

While this structure allows firms to respond quickly in their early stages, it also makes scaling up and professionalization more difficult.

According to the PCI report, around 6.1 million household businesses employing nearly 10 million workers remain the economic backbone for many Vietnamese families.

As a result, support policies aimed at helping these businesses transition into formal enterprises should focus on reducing compliance burdens and creating more favorable conditions.

Ultimately, what many businesses want most right now is probably not more incentives, but a stable enough environment to confidently invest for the long term and grow alongside the economy.

Vietnamese private enterprises may not yet possess strong financial scale, but over many years they have consistently demonstrated a distinctive resilience: the harder the conditions become, the faster they adapt to survive and preserve their businesses.

Lan Anh