Warsaw set a Vietnam trade target, and Polish food exports there are falling

Vietnamese customs put two-way trade at $3.9 billion in 2025 against a $5 billion target, while Polish agri-food exports fell 3 percent in the first half of this year. Tatiana Masalska-Laska says she has never heard of a contract being signed during a trade mission.

Eight food producers from Łódź province flew to Ho Chi Minh City in August. A slaughterhouse from Tychów. A cold-press oil mill from Łódź. A family juice press at Kałęczew. An organic cheese maker from Opiesin. The province paid for the flights, the stand at the Vietfood & Beverage fair, the insurance and up to 72 kilograms of samples each, out of an EU-funded program called Kierunek Azja. Deputy governor Piotr Wojtysiak led them and met Nguyen Loc Ha of the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee on August 7.

Poland sold about $527 million of goods to Vietnam last year. It bought about $7.6 billion, most of it electronics assembled in Vietnam for global manufacturers — smartphones and telecoms equipment alone run to about $1.26 billion a year — plus footwear and clothing. Polish exports were flat over the first four months of this year. Polish agri-food exports, the strongest category, reached nearly €230 million in 2025 and then fell 3 percent in the first half of 2026, in a market whose economy grew 8.18 percent over the same period.

Donald Tusk and Pham Minh Chinh agreed in Warsaw in January 2025 to push two-way trade to $5 billion. Chu Thi Hoa, second secretary at the Vietnamese embassy’s trade office in Warsaw, said the target covers goods only, not services, and is measured against Vietnamese customs figures, which recorded $3.9 billion in 2025. The two capitals count differently; Polish and UN figures describe a larger relationship.

„It’s nice that both governments set up a $5 billion trade target, but it’s wishful thinking”, said Marcin Porowski, who advises companies on East Asian markets from Gdańsk through his firm Trade With East, after nine years in Ho Chi Minh City with Vietnam Business Consulting.

The missions
Tatiana Masalska-Laska is chief experience officer at TGM Research, a market research firm with offices in Ho Chi Minh City and Warsaw, and sits on the board of CEEC, the Central and Eastern European Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam. She spent two decades in international business roles, at TNS Research in Poland and then with Hilti in Poland, Germany, Vietnam, the UAE, South Africa and Israel. She has watched the delegations arrive for two years.

„I will be super honest with you. During a mission, I have never heard of somebody signing a contract. That’s not the end target”, she said. „When you come back later, you still need to do many things to establish your business, find the distributor, find the brand you want to focus on or find the sector you want to focus on”.

Asked whether she could name a single company that came on a mission and now trades in Vietnam, she said she would have to check the trade and industry records. „There is no one directory where I can check: ‘They came for the mission, they had this meeting and then they established business in Asia.’ I wish we had such a directory”.

„The missions we are talking about are a great starting point, if companies don’t treat them as the end of the sales process: ‘This is where I come, I get the introduction and then I sign.’”
“When you go with a mission, you are meeting the government and authorities, which is very good. You’re also meeting trade organizations, again very good. But then you also need this kind of real-life feedback”, she said, meaning a meeting with a European company already trading in Asia. „They can easily tell you: ‘This is how it works. This is how much time it takes. This is where you need to pay attention.’”

The obstacle is not the tariff
„Currently, there are no practical obstacles for Polish companies; the issue is simply a lack of the right mindset and a poor understanding of different business cultures”, Porowski said. „Polish entrepreneurs expect fast revenue without making initial investments. One round trip to Ho Chi Minh City with a couple of samples and nice brochures is not enough”.

„A Vietnamese company making an initial MOQ order takes on all the risk of the new endeavor. If a Polish partner cannot afford to support them, they cannot expect high sales volumes”.

„If you are bringing chocolates to Asia, here you have high temperatures. If you don’t have chocolates in separate packaging, they will melt and nobody is going to buy them. If they’re sitting in a high-humidity environment, things like mold and bacteria can quickly develop”, Masalska-Laska said. „What works in Europe and in the majority of countries will not necessarily work here”.

„Speak to people working in the same industry. Speak to the trade organizations. Don’t take shortcuts, because that never works”.

Vegelio, of Chechło Drugie, was on the August delegation selling freeze-dried fruit and vegetables, a food built to sit in heat and humidity without refrigeration. Whether it found a buyer is not recorded anywhere.

„I don’t think it’s finding it difficult. I think it’s much easier to find a new market that is familiar to what you know. Going to Asia, if you’ve never done that, is a new adventure”.

“Vietnam is becoming a huge manufacturer serving the whole world. So the numbers growing and coming from Vietnam are not surprising. I think this will generally be the reality”.

„My personal opinion is that there is a huge opportunity. We can also see, because I’m part of EuroCham, how many companies are coming now to Asia and particularly to Vietnam”.

The agreement
„The EVFTA is the EU-Vietnam free trade agreement. It means that for those categories that reached zero duty, it will affect the European members’ products, not only Polish products”, Chu said.

Duties are still coming down in stages. Spirits and wine open up this year; processed foods including jams, preserves and juices in 2028. Meat, the largest Polish export category to Vietnam, is still working through veterinary approval. Agriculture minister Stefan Krajewski met a Vietnamese business and media delegation in Warsaw on August 26 to discuss market access, veterinary requirements and admission procedures for Polish meat, under an EU-cofinanced promotion program run by the Polish meat industry association UPEMI. Blueberries are also opening up.

The investment protection agreement that accompanies the EVFTA does not yet exist in law. President Karol Nawrocki signed Poland’s ratification on November 27 after unanimous votes in the Sejm and the Senate, making Poland the 20th of 27 member states. The European Commission’s own note states that the text becomes binding under international law only once every party has ratified. A Polish company investing in Vietnam this year does so without the protections cited in the bilateral announcements.

„If you’re asking me if Poland is doing a better job than other countries, I think Poland can do a better job”, Masalska-Laska said. „You need to have a little bit of experience doing business abroad and especially in Asia, and I think other countries simply have a little more experience with that”.

„I wish I could tell you that more Polish companies are coming compared with Germany, but it’s not true. I definitely see more German, French and Nordic companies using this opportunity”.
Škoda entered Vietnam in September 2023 and in March 2025 opened an assembly plant in Quang Ninh province, near the port of Haiphong, with the Vietnamese conglomerate Thanh Cong Group. It builds the Kushaq and the Slavia from kits shipped out of Škoda’s Indian operation in Pune, in left-hand drive and specified for local buyers. Fifteen dealerships were open at the launch, with 32 planned by the end of last year. Škoda belongs to Volkswagen, so the capital is not entirely Czech.

In June a GreenEvo delegation, about a dozen firms picked by Poland’s Ministry of Climate and Environment, spent a week in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, meeting EuroCham on the 16th and the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry on the 17th. Piotr Harasimowicz, who heads the Polish Trade Office in Ho Chi Minh City, presented water and wastewater treatment and circular-economy solutions. Bùi Thị Ninh, deputy director of the chamber’s city branch, called green technology an area of significant potential as Vietnam works toward net zero by 2050.
Ecopolplast, one of the twelve, offers Ecoplastomer, a recycled thermoplastic, on a licence: Vietnamese partners manufacture it locally from local waste streams and need no research of their own. Kat Pokwicka-Croucher, the chief executive, put that model to Vietnamese industrial partners in Ho Chi Minh City.

The market
Vietnam grew 8 percent in 2025. The World Bank moved it to upper-middle-income status, on gross national income per capita rising from $4,490 to $4,970. The population is approaching 102 million. Bożena Wróblewska of the Polish Chamber of Commerce promotion center has put the Vietnamese middle class at 15 percent of society, against about 54 percent in Poland, with room to grow by half or to double.

„Vietnam is booming in all of those industries and bringing in new technologies and new solutions. In my opinion, they are very smart. They are not choosing just by price but also by experience”, said Masalska-Laska, who names green technology, recycling and waste management, construction, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, food processing and agriculture as the fits.

Adamed Pharma bought 70 percent of the generic drug maker Davipharm at the end of 2017 and the remaining 30 percent in April 2023. It puts total committed capital in Vietnam at nearly $60 million, among the largest Polish direct investments in Southeast Asia. The plant in Binh Duong province was the first in Vietnam and Southeast Asia certified to EU standards for high-potency oncology drugs, and IQVIA data put Davipharm among the top seven Vietnamese companies by prescription drug sales in the third quarter of last year. When Pham Minh Chinh was in Warsaw in January 2025 he met Adamed and pressed it to invest further and transfer technology.

Chinh raised something else in Warsaw that January: defense-industrial cooperation, and specifically innovation, training and drone production. In August last year deputy defense minister Paweł Bejda met Rear Admiral Lê Bá Quân, deputy commander of the Vietnamese navy, and the two discussed exporting Polish weapons. Nothing was announced. Vietnam already has four Polish MS-20 S Daglezja assault bridges, delivered in 2021; three of them appeared in the parade marking 80 years of independence. Bulgaria and Britain both signed strategic partnerships with Hanoi last October, each including defense. Poland has not.

Olejvita, Wiatrowy Sad, Serabio and Vegelio went to FoodEx Japan in Tokyo in March 2025 and to the London Food & Drink Event this year before Ho Chi Minh City. Olejvita launched its cold-pressed oils in Vietnam at the August fair.

About 100 to 120 Poles live in Ho Chi Minh City, Masalska-Laska said, with 50 in Hanoi and 30 in Da Nang. LOT starts flying Warsaw to Hanoi on March 31, three times a week, a route Chinh asked LOT’s acting president, Michał Fijoł, to restore during that same January visit.
“The best outcomes come from great cooperation. If you bring technology or know-how, you don’t do it by yourself. You do it together with Vietnamese partners and together with the huge labor market, which is also very talented”, she said.

„The most important factor comes from the companies themselves: just have the courage, understand the implications, understand the differences and just go for it”.