Representatives of the Ho Chi Minh City Business Association said that to achieve high growth targets, the State needs to play a clear leading role. In fact, through many recent development research conferences, it shows that there is still a lot of room from new economic models such as night economy, sea economy, weekend economy, river economy or cultural economy.
According to businesses, the current way of organizing events also needs to change in the direction of being associated with experience and consumption. While many traditional fairs are increasingly difficult to attract businesses to participate, thematic festivals such as the bread, fish sauce or beer festival create a good spillover effect, attracting a large number of people and tourists.
In the creative economic sector group, fashion is considered a field with a lot of room to increase added value for the city's economy. Ms. Tran Hoang Phu Xuan - Vice President of the Ho Chi Minh City Textile and Fashion Association - said that one of the important orientations today is to bring Vietnamese brands and designers to participate in international fashion shows in a more methodical way.
According to Ms. Xuan, many countries in the region such as Indonesia are promoting national fashion on international catwalks. This shows that if Vietnam wants to create new growth momentum, it needs to quickly shift from a processing model to creative development, branding and retail.
Currently, the strength of Vietnam's garment industry still mainly lies in production and operation capacity, while high added value factors such as design, brand or retail system are still quite faint.
Not only fashion, the food industry in Ho Chi Minh City is also showing great growth potential when taking good advantage of support policies and expanding export markets.
Ms. Ly Kim Chi - Chairwoman of the Ho Chi Minh City Food Association (FFA) - said that in 2025, the city's food industry grew by 11%. In the first 2 months of 2026, the food processing industry continued to grow by 13.2%, with beverage production alone increasing by more than 20%.
According to Ms. Chi, this result was achieved thanks to the efforts of coordination between the business community and the Ho Chi Minh City government in removing inadequacies in Decree 46/2026 in the direction of maintaining post-inspection instead of returning to pre-inspection. This helps businesses save costs, shorten time and improve competitiveness.
At the same time, Ho Chi Minh City is also promoting the expansion of export markets. Many seminars guiding businesses to achieve Halal certification have been organized to create conditions to penetrate the potential Islamic market, instead of being too dependent on traditional markets such as the US and EU.
