Welcome Address | SEA500

Dear Mr. Lê Tấn Cẩn, Vice Minister of Finance, dear leaders of Fortune Asia, leaders of corporations, funds, financial institutes in the regions, representatives of business associations, On international and domestic scale, on behalf of the People's Committee of Ho Chi Minh City, I would like to extend a very warm welcome to all of you to the biggest fortunes of Southeast Asia. 500 Summit 2026. I would like to show my gratitude to Fortune Asia for choosing Ho Chi Minh City to be the venue for this event. And congratulations to all the companies for being recognized today. Your presence would be a good chance for us to enhance the dialogues within the region, seeking new opportunities, matching the new era of development. From the 1st of July 2025 Hồ Chí Minh City, Bình Dương, and Bà Rịa Vũng Tàu were merged into a new Hồ Chí Minh City with more than 14 million people, contributing around 23.5% of the national GDP, becoming one of the biggest economic hubs of Vietnam. The city has all the financial, commercial service advantages with the presence of high-tech. industrial zone, industrial complex, and deep sea ports connecting Vietnam with overseas markets. These convergences gives us the advantages to leverage the advantages that we have, creating Creating more room for investment and leveraging The connections getting deeper in the regional supply chain, on those platforms, in the first six months of the year, the total service value of the city increased by 9 percent. FDI registration reaching more than 19 billion U.S. dollar, million U.S. dollar, and accounting for 30 percent of that of the whole country. which is a positive signal showing the interest of investors for the city among the new investor projects we have new projects in infrastructure and high-tech projects like Like, yeah. transshipment projects with more than 4.9 billion US dollars in terms of value we also have AI factory data center the investment of two point one billion US dollars In the new space of development, Ho Chi Minh City is having other conditions to attract long-term investments. We also want to clarify our opportunities for growth and the conditions for long-term partnerships. I would like to focus on the four key links. Firstly, for the long-term developments, With the new institution framework, we have resolution number nine of the Politburo identifying Ho Chi Minh City as the new scientific, technology, innovation, commercial, and financial center with international competitiveness, and that adds more legal framework and proactivity to the city for urban development and resource mobilization. This is a very strong foundation for the city to put the policies into action, opening up more opportunities to work with the investors in the coming time. Secondly, we have more opportunities for market and supply chain development. The city already have a strong foundation for commerce, trading. And connections for the localities to work with international partners. We have the presence of big names like Samsung Intel in our high-tech industrial park, playing a very important role in that platform. And we would love to work with international investor to focus more on supplying the services to the country and to the region. The third focus is connecting the resources to enhance the investment outcomes, combining technology, science, and the capital advantages for investors to really get big income outcomes from their investment, connecting Vietnam to the world through Cai Mep deep sea ports, human resource. And energy resource. We also put a very strong focus on free trade zone, IFC, and industrial parks with investment projects based on the true capital demand and risk management capacity of each project. The fourth point would be enforcement. Management and support throughout the life cycle of an investment, we clearly identified that the outcomes of a project would be the quality of support, the clarity of guidelines from the government, and the successful collaboration in dealing with issues for specific. Recommendations and suggestions for collaboration. ITBC is assigned to be the liaison agency to work with investors to identify next steps. We also want to have plans for partnership right from today. Okay, submit. Well, ladies and gentlemen, Ho Chi Minh City really respects and treasures the contributions of investors, and we look forward to working with them. We hope that today's agenda will give you more input to identify the opportunities and your partners here in Ho Chi Minh City. We are ready to listen to your input, to work with you, to give you more support so that together we can have successful and long-term partnerships. And I wish you good health, happiness, a lot of successes, and a fruitful summit today. Thank you.