(April 9): Samsung Electronics Co plans a US$4 billion ($5.1 billion) outlay to build a chip packaging plant in northern Vietnam, as the country’s largest foreign investor expands its footprint in the country.
The investment in the Thai Nguyen province will be implemented in several phases, with the first consisting of a US$2 billion outlay, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is private.
A representative of Samsung declined to comment. Vietnam’s Finance Ministry confirmed it’s working on a memorandum of understanding with Samsung on plans for a semiconductor project in a statement released on Thursday, without giving details.
Samsung and its global peers are expanding at a rapid pace to meet rising demand for chips that go into data centres and gadgets running artificial intelligence (AI) services. The South Korean conglomerate was an early investor in Vietnam, building its first factory in the northern province of Bac Ninh in 2008.
Since then, Vietnam has evolved into the company’s largest global phone manufacturing base, with another factory to produce smartphones in Thai Nguyen established in 2013.
One of Asia’s fastest-growing economies, Vietnam has emerged as a manufacturing powerhouse as firms diversify production away from China to hedge against the impacts of Beijing’s trade war with the US. Last year, Vietnam defied expectations of a slowdown during US President Donald Trump’s global tariff blitz, and instead sent record shipments to its biggest outbound market.
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As Vietnam’s largest exporter, Samsung sits at the heart of the country’s manufacturing ecosystem, anchoring a vast supply chain that spans smartphones, components and increasingly higher-value activities such as displays and research and development. The company has been instrumental in helping transform Vietnam into a global electronics hub, drawing in a network of suppliers and boosting industrial capacity, even as much of the value chain remains dependent on imported inputs and foreign firms.
Samsung has invested more than US$23.2 billion in Vietnam and created 90,000 jobs for Vietnamese workers, according to a government website citing figures as of 2024.
In 2022, the company pumped US$920 million into its Thai Nguyen operations, bringing the capital invested in a Samsung Electro-Mechanics factory to US$2.3 billion. It pledged to invest a further US$1.2 billion to produce high-end electronic circuit boards in the province earlier this year, according to information from the Finance Ministry.
Uploaded by Tham Yek Lee
