Foreign investors, especially ones Chinese, are buying Vietnam’s textile and garment companies. The enterprises on sale are mostly small ones mostly located in localities with advantageous transport conditions.

Some of the factories comprise production workshops, a security room, a canteen and pleasure room for workers, and electricity systems. The trend has gathered momentum to an extent that there is a view that foreign invested enterprises, and not Vietnam’s textile and garment industry, would benefit from the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement and that with their powerful financial capability and experience, they have taken over Vietnam’s enterprises precisely to get benefits from the TPP.

About 70 per cent of Vietnam’s textile and garment export turnover is made up from foreign owned enterprises, which shows their large operating scale and the big role they play in the industry. Foreign investors are supposed to have a hidden motive in acquiring Vietnam’s textile and garment enterprises. It’s that this way they can dodge the regulations set up by local authorities aiming to restrict investment projects in the textile and garment sector.

In time, it is feared, foreign owned enterprises would become even larger, while Vietnamese enterprises would lose their market share and shrink.