The Arc
In 1990, Vietnam exported $2.4 billion of goods — mostly crude oil, rice and seafood (garments became a leading item only from the mid-1990s). By 2025 it exported $475 billion. The 198× expansion is not a typo.
The composition transformed. Computers, electronics and components ($107.8 billion in 2025) and phones and components ($56.7 billion) together make up about 35% of the export basket ($164.5B of $475B) — up from 31% in 2024. Computers, not phones, are now the larger half, and electronics alone drove more than half of 2025's export growth (+48% year-on-year). The United States is the top destination, absorbing $153.2 billion in 2025 — about 32% of the total.
The Value-Added Collapse
Vietnam's domestic value added share of exports — the portion of each export dollar that stays as wages, profits and locally sourced inputs — fell from 76.9% (1995) to 52.0% (2020, OECD TiVA). That is the steepest decline in the value-added data we track: the next-largest fall among the 20 economies covered is Japan's −7.9 percentage points, less than a third of Vietnam's −24.9. (Verified across those 20 economies; not checked against the full 76-economy TiVA set. TiVA's 2025 edition extends to 2022 but was not accessible for this piece.)
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