Many foreign investors, especially those from Japan, have poured hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into Ho Chi Minh City and Dong Nai Province for the past two months, according to official statistics.

Foreign direct investment (FDI), both channeled into newly registered projects and added to existing ones, has rocketed to US$225.35 million in January-February, the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Planning and Investment said.

Most of the FDI has come from medium-sized projects run by Japanese firms, namely $35.5 million of Yazaki Eds Vietnam Ltd., committed to Tan Phu Trung Industrial Park in Cu Chi District, and $30 million poured into Tan Thuan Export Processing Zone in District 7 by Furukawa Automotive Parts Ltd.  

Of almost $500 million worth of newly-registered FDI in Dong Nai Province, a neighbor of Ho Chi Minh City, within the first two months of this year, 26.08 percent have been supplied by Japanese investors, the local Department of Planning and Investment said. 

By June 20 last year, Japanese investors had had 2,661 existing projects in Vietnam worth $37.7 billion, according to the Foreign Investment Agency under the Ministry of Planning and Investment.

In 2014, Japan’s FDI in Vietnam fell 65 percent to $2.05 billion from $5.87 billion in 2013, according to data released by the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO).

Despite this, a number of business delegations from different Japanese localities visited Vietnam to seek cooperation opportunities in the agro-industry following high-level meetings between the two countries, Nguyen Trung Dung, a trade counselor at the Vietnamese Embassy in Japan, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper in an interview in November 2014.

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