As Ho Chi Minh City enters the 2025–2030 term, experts believe the city must establish four key foundations for development. The city's agenda centers on building an integrated economy tied to an international financial hub, and investing in science, technology, and digital transformation.
Additionally, HCMC aims to overhaul its logistics and infrastructure to better connect with surrounding regions and bolster its human resources to support a modern, digitally-driven government.
These strategic initiatives are designed to build upon the city's existing strengths and align with the national vision outlined in the Politburo’s Resolution 31. By focusing on these four core areas, officials believe HCMC can fulfill its long-held ambition of becoming a leading mega-city with significant regional reach.
Integrating growth poles
The merger of three localities has opened a new chapter for HCMC, positioning it to transform into a dynamic and world-class mega-city. To seize this momentum, the city must remain a pioneer in innovation and decisive action, while swiftly addressing shortcomings and advancing development strategies aligned with Resolution 31.
This integration not only expands the city’s scale but also restructures the way its economy operates by blending industry, commerce, services, finance, and logistics into a seamless, borderless space.
With a strong socio-economic foundation from 2020–2025 and sustained support from the central government, HCMC now stands at a historic crossroads, with the opportunity to rise as a global city and act as the country’s economic locomotive in an era of prosperity and deep international integration.
Experts note that the deeper connections among HCMC, Binh Duong, and Ba Ria–Vung Tau create an economic triangle that combines financial services, high-tech industry, logistics, and seaports by forming a springboard for breakthrough growth.
Beyond ongoing North–South and urban railway lines, priority should be given to rail links directly connecting major port clusters such as Can Gio–Cai Mep–Thi Vai and industrial zones in Dong Nai and Binh Duong. Accelerating these projects would provide a powerful boost to socio-economic development both in HCMC and nationwide.
HCMC’s mega-city vision is not just about administrative expansion but about building an integrated, competitive economic entity capable of engaging with global hubs like Seoul, Tokyo, and Shanghai. This requires clear specialization among growth poles.
Professor Hoang Van Cuong, National Assembly deputy and member of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council, emphasized that integrating Binh Duong’s industrial belt and Ba Ria–Vung Tau’s seaport gateway with HCMC’s financial-service core will enable a rational logistics system, reduce investment overlap, cut supply chain costs, and elevate tourism into a high-value “city-to-sea” destination.
Urban planning experts also stress the vast potential unlocked by unification, from coastal resources to land reserves—addressing long-standing weaknesses such as the lack of deep-water ports and marine tourism space. Crucially, the city must synchronize “hard connectivity” (expressways, railways, ports, airports) with “soft connectivity” (data, open institutions, regional coordination), positioning HCMC as the integrated growth engine of the Southeast region.
New growth drivers
If physical expansion provides a mega-city, science, technology, innovation, and digital transformation are its new engines of growth—defining both the speed and quality of HCMC’s future development.
In recent years, especially 2020–2025, the city has built a solid ecosystem for innovation and digital transformation, including policy toolkits such as grants for startups, special incentives to attract top talent, tax exemptions for innovative enterprises, and regulatory sandboxes for emerging technologies at the High-Tech Park and Quang Trung Software City. Scaling these tools across the expanded city opens opportunities for innovation chains spanning logistics, smart transport, and digital healthcare.
According to Lam Dinh Thang, Director of HCMC’s Department of Science and Technology, the city aims to allocate 3 percent of its budget to science, technology, innovation, and digital transformation by 2030. Plans include establishing an international financial center, four high-tech hubs (AI–data–semiconductors, healthcare, education, and advanced industries), and strategic infrastructure including transport and digital networks.
The city also envisions a mega AI Data Center, a National Data Center, an expanded High-Tech Park, and an internationally recognized Innovation Hub.
However, experts such as head Truong Minh Huy Vu of Ho Chi Minh City Institute for Development Studies stress that the financial center’s success requires legal and regulatory alignment to avoid overlaps, as well as 24/7 infrastructure and seamless airport-port connectivity to attract global investors. Positioned as a “transformer” of capital flows, the center would mobilize and distribute global resources for major national and city projects.
Economist Can Van Luc highlights four goals for the financial center: spurring regional growth, mobilizing and allocating resources effectively, upgrading traditional services while creating new ones, and contributing to institutional reform. To achieve this, HCMC must identify strategic investors, build a modern governance model, attract top financial talent, and establish 24/7 IT infrastructure—creating a true “financial city that never sleeps.”
Former HIDS director Associate Professor Tran Hoang Ngan adds that HCMC has already entered global financial center rankings, proving its readiness to leap to the regional stage. The city must now scale its innovation policies across the expanded urban space, extending sandbox mechanisms to new sectors such as port–air logistics, urban data, smart transport, and digital healthcare.
With breakthrough policies from Resolution 98/2023/QH15—ranging from research incentives to tax exemptions for startups—HCMC has laid strong institutional groundwork. The next challenge is to expand and harmonize these measures across the unified mega-city, with a special model linking the urban core, industrial belt, and seaport gateways.
