Vietnam Economic Times November 03, 2025

Dear readers,

After 25 years of development, Vietnam’s stock market has become a key channel for mobilizing medium and long-term capital for the economy, reflecting the country’s economic health, prospects, and development capacity. The legal framework is being steadily completed, the 10-million stock market account mark has been passed, and the market capitalization of all stocks and bonds is nearly equal to 100 per cent of GDP, providing the capital required for the economy and economic organizations. The KRX (Korea Exchange) system went live on May 5 and helps modernize stock market infrastructure, improve liquidity and trading efficiency, and pave the way for new products, and is an important step towards the goal of upgrading the market to Emerging market status in the future.

Despite being the youngest market in ASEAN, Vietnam’s market capitalization is now equal to Malaysia’s, has surpassed the Philippines’, and is only slightly behind Thailand’s. In particular, liquidity in the Vietnamese market led the Southeast Asian region over the past week, surpassing even Thailand.

Speaking at a ceremony commemorating the 25th anniversary of the stock market’s operations, held at the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange (HoSE) on July 28, Minister of Finance Nguyen Van Thang affirmed that “Our stock market has formed a solid foundation, with stable quality and institutions, creating an important premise for realizing the goal of market upgrade.”

Then came some long-awaited news: On October 8, at 3am (Hanoi time), FTSE Russell announced that Vietnam’s stock market met all the criteria and would be upgraded from Frontier market to Secondary Emerging market. The effective date of the upgrade is expected to be September 21, 2026, following a mid-term review in March.

The upgrade will create more opportunities and advantages for further development, especially in attracting foreign capital inflows in the future. However, it also represents a challenge, requiring further extensive reforms, increasing capacity to maintain macro-economic stability, strengthening foreign exchange reserves, enhancing competitiveness, and creating an open dialogue mechanism with global investors.

To provide readers with the latest on the opportunities as well as the challenges and requirements for Vietnam’s stock market after the upgrade, our Cover Story in this edition analyzes the prospects for commodity-money relations with the market being upgraded, as well as Vietnam’s ability to maximize the advantages to further develop its stock market and pursue an even higher upgrade, to Emerging market status under MSCI standards by 2030.