COVID-19 halts business operations in Vietnam
2020 has not been business as usual for many companies in Vietnam due to the disruption brought forth by the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the General Statistics Office (GSO) of Vietnam, 29,200 businesses registered to temporarily suspend operations in the first 6 months of 2020, while another 19,600 businesses are waiting to complete dissolution procedures.
On the upside, 13,700 companies were established in June, bringing the total number of new businesses to 62,000, although this represented a 7.3% year-on-year decrease.
The Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs also reported that 7.8 million workers lost their jobs or had their working hours reduced. In the first 6 months of the year, the number of people receiving unemployment benefits rose by 32% year-on-year to 565,000.
For the first half of 2020, Vietnam’s GDP growth was 1.81%, the lowest registered in a decade. This comes after record growth in the two years prior, with 2019’s 7.02% growth close to repeating 2018’s record high of 7.08%.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) had earlier predicted a 4.1% growth for Vietnam in 2020, which will make the country, alongside Brunei and Myanmar, as the only countries to register growth in ASEAN this year.
READ: COVID-19 likely to wipe out growth across Asia-Pacific in 2020
There are currently about 760,000 businesses operating Vietnam, with 49.1% expressing a positive outlook for the third quarter of 2020 compared to the second quarter, a survey from the GSO found. 19.4% of companies expected to experience “difficulties”, while 31.5% expected stability in their business.
