Adapting to risks key to company resilience

Uncertainty has become the dominant risk in the past year.

- By Douglas Matheson Chief risk and compliance officer HSBC Vietnam

Teams on the ground can address issues and provide solution in real time, shaping future responses

Foreign exchange volatility resurfaced, periods of US dollar strength against VND affected import costs and cash-flow assumptions, and moves in regional currencies complicated cross-border planning.

At the same time, heightened uncertainty supported appreciation in gold and silver, reinforcing how quickly market sentiment can shift and how exposed unhedged positions can become.

For corporates in Vietnam, tariff uncertainty emerged as a particularly challenging feature of the operating environment. The Vietnamese economy grew by an impressive 8.02 per cent in 2025, but this was not an easy feat. Shifts in policy direction were often accompanied by unclear timelines and outcomes, making it difficult to plan around pricing, demand, and supply chains with confidence.

In many cases, the uncertainty itself proved as disruptive as any eventual tariff, underscoring how policy unpredictability can become a material risk even before concrete measures are implemented.

The central lesson from last year remained less about prediction and more about preparedness: how organisations identify risk, build effective frameworks and governance, and test assumptions. This becomes especially important when decisions must be made quickly with incomplete or evolving data.

The risks highlighted last year are not going away. Events in the past month have highlighted that events on the other side of the world can have immediate impacts here in Vietnam.

Headlines have been focused on oil prices, which rapidly fed through to increases at the petrol pumps. We will see multiple knock-on impacts across multiple sectors. Airlines and shipping are warning of the need to raise prices.