Yap Kwong Weng is a little frustrated with where U.S. tariffs on Vietnam are right now.
“U.S. tariffs have changed three times this year,” the Vietnam SuperPort CEO tells Fortune. When the year began, tariffs on Vietnamese goods stood at 20%, as agreed by Washington and Hanoi as part of an interim trade framework in October 2025. Then, in February, the Supreme Court struck down the reciprocal tariffs U.S. President Donald Trump imposed in April 2025 as unlawful; Trump, in response, imposed a global 10% tariff on all imports.
Since July, most Vietnamese goods now carry a 12.5% import duty, following a U.S. Section 301 investigation into forced labor enforcement. Tariffs are likely to change again—either due to ongoing trade negotiations between the U.S. and Vietnam, or following further U.S. probes into industrial overcapacity and intellectual property protections.
“Companies now have stopped looking at stability,” Yap says. “Now they are planning for uncertainty.”
Yap is the CEO of Vietnam SuperPort, a joint venture between Singapore’s YCH Group, a family-owned logistics company, and T&T Group, a Vietnamese conglomerate. Based in Phu Tho province, north of Hanoi, the 83-hectare logistics hub sits on the corridors linking Vietnam’s electronics manufacturing belt to the Chinese border, where most of the components come from. The idea is that road, rail, air, and sea transit works as one service, so an exporter can tap one predictable route rather than four different modes.
The SuperPort’s air cargo terminal is already operational, and Yap claims that monthly revenue has increased fivefold since July. Customers include FedEx, major global forwarders, and top electronics and AI hardware companies.
Yap’s rule, he says, has been to be “the most trusted first.” That instinct is now being tested on a national scale. SuperPort’s roughly $300 million hub is a bet that Vietnam can graduate from routine final assembly to a genuine logistics and value-added base. SuperPort’s air cargo terminal handles consumer electronics, AI server racks and networking gear, freight valuable enough for air cargo and sensitive enough to need TAPA certification for security.
That strategy now faces two challenges. One is Washington: whether goods stamped “made in Vietnam” keep flowing through the door as tariffs whipsaw and U.S. probes on Vietnam grow in number. (The U.S. roughly buys a third of all Vietnamese exports) The other is Hanoi: whether the country can build the infrastructure, energy, and skills to sustain its high pace of growth.
A ‘super normal’ economy
Vietnam’s economy grew by 9.95% in the third quarter of 2026, putting the country within reach of Hanoi’s target of 10% growth for the year. It is somehow—despite continued trade uncertainty and disruption from the Iran war—growing faster than last year’s 8% GDP growth. Yap calls it a “super normal” economy: Things that may be annoyances in a slower economy become real barriers to growth in a faster-growing one like Vietnam.
Exports remain the key driver of Vietnamese growth. The country exported almost $500 billion worth of goods in the first ten months of the year. Much of that trade is with the U.S., Vietnam’s most important export partner; the country now has a $140 billion trade surplus with the U.S. for the year so far.
Vietnam has now slotted itself comfortably into “China plus one” supply chains, where manufacturing, particularly final assembly, are housed in third countries to take advantage of lower costs and, possibly, lower tariffs. Chinese-made components now cross the border into Vietnam, where factories owned by Samsung, Foxconn, and others assemble the pieces; the finished products are then shipped to their final destinations in the U.S., Europe and markets across Asia.
But the costs of these cross-border supply chains add up. Logistics costs currently run somewhere between 16% and 20% of Vietnam’s GDP; Hanoi hopes to get that level down below 12% by 2030. Yap says these costs come from administration, customs and transport fees, and are either borne by the exporter or passed on to consumers.
“Smarter infrastructure,” in Yap’s eyes, is the only way to get those costs down.
Both China and Vietnam are investing billions into infrastructure to better integrate their economies. Vietnam is spending $11 billion on the Lao Cai–Hanoi–Haiphong rail line, designed to link China’s rail network at the northern border directly to Haiphong’s deep-water port on a modern, standard-gauge line—cutting the cost and time of moving Chinese components and Vietnamese exports between the Chinese border and the sea. The country is also replacing Ho Chi Minh City’s stretched Tan Son Nhat airport with the new Long Thanh airport, which should be able to shift more cargo capacity to southern Vietnam.
China, for its part, opened the 134-kilometer Pinglu Canal in September, giving the country’s industrial southwest its first direct water route to the sea and pointing the route south at Vietnam, rather than east toward Guangzhou. Freight from Guangxi once had to travel hundreds of kilometers down the Xijiang River to the Pearl River Delta; now ships of up to 5,000 tonnes sail straight into the Gulf of Tonkin, cutting more than 560 kilometers off the trip and, by Beijing’s estimates, as much as 30% off logistics costs.
Energy is another bottleneck in Vietnam. Some provinces have seen power shutdowns, despite heavy investment in new generation, including renewables. A related constraint is money: Some estimates put the financing gap in Vietnam as large as $200 billion; other estimates suggest the power sector will need $142 billion by 2030. “There is a bankability problem right now,” he says.
Vietnam’s place in these supply chains is raising eyebrows in Washington, with some elements of the Trump administration seeing this as a way for Chinese companies to evade U.S. tariffs. The argument is that by conducting minimal value-added activity in Vietnam, Chinese goods get a “made in Vietnam” label, and thus avoid steeper tariffs placed on Chinese-made goods. (In last year’s interim trade agreement between the U.S. and Vietnam, Hanoi agreed to a 40% on goods deemed to have been transshipped from China, though details on what that meant, or how it would be investigated, weren’t given)
Yap is also thinking about value-added, though from a Vietnam-based perspective. “What is important is how the goods are being handled securely, the quality, and where the value goes,” he says. “Does the value stay onshore? Is it where Vietnamese managers and companies grow, or the value goes offshore?”
Vietnam is pushing for high-income status by 2045. Yap argues that shift means moving from just assembly to real innovation by investing in skills for engineering, automation, semiconductor packaging, and logistics. Hanoi wants the new technology to contribute 6% of GDP by 2030, driven by local players like Viettel and FPT.
‘Frontier optimism is not a strategy’
Yap’s biography is novel, by most standards. He spent more than a decade in Singapore’s armed forces, including U.S. Navy Seal training. He finished his first degree at age 30, and later held business leadership roles in Southeast Asian emerging markets and consulting positions with KPMG and EY-Parthenon in Singapore.
One of those markets was Myanmar, which Yap describes as looking a lot like Vietnam, with hotels full of American, Korean, and Thai executives convinced they’d found the next high-growth market. That confidence was upended by the 2021 military coup, which set Myanmar’s putative economic opening back by a generation.
That Myanmar experience now drives how he sees Vietnam. “Infrastructure depends on confidence from investors,” he says. “I remain very optimistic about Vietnam. But I’m never complacent about it.”
“Frontier optimism is not a strategy,” he adds.
SuperPort is planning for that uncertainty rather than against it. Yap says his customers now ask him three questions: “Who controls the data? Who verifies the origin? And what are the routes that can be rerouted so that one storage location can go to another storage location?”
His answer is a network: SuperPort intends to build four ports across Southeast Asia by 2030. Cambodia SuperPort, a 130-hectare multimodal complex in Kampong Speu, near Phnom Penh, and is meant to connect back into Vietnam through a planned hub in Tay Ninh province, on the Cambodian border.
Tariffs could change a fourth, or even a fifth, time this year: Perhaps Vietnam gets slapped with new Section 301 tariffs, or Washington and Hanoi sign a new trade deal that brings overall tariff levels down again.Through all of it, Yap keeps his eye on the one thing tariffs can’t change: what’s happening on the ground. “For now, I think Vietnam has the momentum,” he says.
In Fortune’s Asia Agenda column, released at least twice a month, we speak with Asia’s top business leaders about how they are building for the future and the lessons they’ve drawn from leading companies in one of the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic regions. Explore all of our profiles here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com