The National Assembly has passed the revised Investment Law (Investment Law 2025). The 2025 Investment Law takes effect from March 1, 2026.
One of the objectives of this amendment of the Investment Law is to improve regulations on conditional business lines and business investment conditions, and at the same time cut some unnecessary and unreasonable business lines.
The new law has also reviewed and cut 39 conditional business lines that do not meet the criteria and conditions specified in Article 7 of the Investment Law and amended the scope of 20 conditional business lines, in order to strongly shift from the "pre-inspection" mechanism to the "post-inspection" mechanism, ensuring the freedom of business investment of enterprises.
The 2025 Investment Law has also sharply reduced pre-inspection procedures, accelerated project implementation; narrowed down the group of projects that must apply for investment policy approval, only keeping projects that have a major impact on land, environment, national defense - security or related to strategic resources. Common projects, especially in the fields of production, trade, and services, are transferred to registration and post-inspection mechanisms.
Article 28 of the 2025 Investment Law allows investors to choose special investment procedures for projects in industrial parks, export processing zones, high-tech zones, concentrated digital technology zones, free trade zones, international financial centers and functional zones in economic zones (except in cases where investment policy approval is required).
Projects according to this procedure do not have to carry out a series of steps such as: approval of investment policy, technology appraisal, environmental impact assessment report, detailed planning, construction permit, fire prevention and fighting...
Instead, there is a mechanism to commit to complying with standards and regulations according to the provisions of law on construction, environmental protection, fire prevention and fighting.
Regarding procedures for adjusting investment projects, the amended and supplemented Law stipulates regulations on adjusting investment projects in Article 33 to narrow the cases where investment policy adjustment decisions must be made in order to simplify procedures, create favorable conditions for investors, and avoid minor adjustments that also require adjusting investment policies.
The new law also simplifies procedures in the direction of creating more favorable conditions for foreign investors. Accordingly, the Law allows foreign investors to establish economic organizations without requiring investment projects before establishment.
However, it is necessary to meet market access conditions for foreign investors when carrying out procedures to establish economic organizations to help the investment and business environment become more open and attractive.
