Vietnam's franchise market has become a two-way street

For most of its three-decade history, franchising in Vietnam meant one thing: foreign brands coming in. The Ministry of Industry and Trade's registry tells that story in numbers — more than 310 foreign franchisors registered to operate in Vietnam, up from 262 in mid-2020, with roughly 15–20 new foreign brands licensed in a typical year. Food and beverage dominates, accounting for over half of all registered franchise agreements, and by recent trade analyses Singapore has become the single largest source of inbound F&B franchise brands, ahead of Japan, China and South Korea.

Underneath those registrations sits a consumer market that keeps rewarding entrants. Vietnam's food-service market is estimated at roughly $27 billion and growing, urbanization continues to add millions to the consuming class, and a young population treats branded dining, education and personal services as normal spending, not luxury. This is why global chains keep coming — and why the inbound lane will stay crowded.

The new lane: Vietnamese brands going out

The genuinely new development of the mid-2020s is the outbound lane. It is still narrow — by MOIT's own outbound registry, only around two dozen Vietnamese brands have formally registered to franchise abroad — but the traffic on it has become impossible to ignore.

Trung Nguyên's E-Coffee network has grown to roughly 800 stores, including footholds in the United States and more than twenty locations in China. Highlands Coffee, majority-owned by Jollibee Foods Corporation, operates dozens of stores in the Philippines — proof that a Vietnamese concept can scale inside another ASEAN market under a regional corporate umbrella. And the accelerator generation is moving fastest of all: Phúc Tea's international brand HappiTea entered the Philippines through a master franchise structure, opened its first three stores in Hyderabad, India in April 2026, and has partnership pipelines across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar.

What these movers share is method, not luck. Each entered through a master franchise or corporate partner rather than self-operating abroad; each protected a signature product while adapting the surrounding menu; and each treated Vietnam's culinary identity — phở, cà phê, trà — as an export asset with genuine pull in diaspora and halal markets.

What still holds the market back

Honesty requires naming the frictions. Most Vietnamese brands considering outbound expansion still lack transferable documentation — operating manuals, training systems and supply specifications written for someone else to run the business. Raw-material export logistics remain a real constraint for concepts built on Vietnamese ingredients. Legal preparation is routinely underweighted: franchising into markets like Indonesia, the Gulf or the US means meeting disclosure and registration regimes far stricter than Vietnam's own. And the domestic talent pool of franchise-literate managers, while growing, is thin relative to the ambition now visible in the market.

None of these are fatal. All of them are exactly the gaps that structured franchise packaging, honest unit-economics work and properly diligenced partner selection are designed to close — which is why we built our accelerator around those disciplines.

The five-year picture

Put the two lanes together and Vietnam's franchise market looks like Malaysia's or Thailand's did a decade and a half ago: a maturing inbound market compounding steadily, and an outbound generation crossing from first-mover experiments to repeatable playbooks. The difference is speed — Vietnam is compressing that maturation cycle, powered by a larger domestic consumer base than either predecessor had at the same stage. For investors, the inbound lane offers proven demand with rising sophistication. For Vietnamese founders, the outbound lane is open, mapped by real precedents, and still early enough that the next dozen success stories are unwritten.

Go Global Holdings exists for that second lane — scaling Southeast Asian brands globally through licensing and franchising, from packaging to partner matching. This analysis is part three of our five-part series on the state of franchising in 2026.