Haiphong
LG invested $5.65 billion in a single Vietnamese port city producing 14M OLED displays monthly — 11 consecutive years of double-digit GDP growth through engineered tax incentives.
LG has invested $5.65 billion in Haiphong alone — more than many countries receive in total annual FDI — building capacity to produce 14 million OLED displays monthly in a city that was still primarily known for cement factories and shrimp farming two decades ago. Haiphong, Vietnam's third-largest city with 2.1 million people, sits where the Cam River meets the Gulf of Tonkin in northern Vietnam, operating the country's largest northern port.
Its 11th consecutive year of double-digit GDP growth in 2025 (11.81%, second nationally) is not an accident but a manufactured outcome: the city offers corporate tax exemptions for the first four years and 50% reductions for the following nine — more generous than any other Vietnamese industrial zone. The result: 1,768 active FDI projects totalling $50.8 billion in registered capital, with FDI inflows surpassing $3.
The result: 1,768 active FDI projects totalling $50.8 billion in registered capital, with FDI inflows surpassing $3.
5 billion in the first 11 months of 2024 alone, exceeding the annual target by 140%. The port-city development story is better understood as Vietnam's most successful experiment in manufacturing ecosystem construction. Twelve industrial parks house 420 foreign-invested projects from 36 countries, accounting for over 60% of the city's industrial output and 70% of export turnover. LG Display, LG Innotek, and LG Electronics generated combined revenues of $13.
97 billion in 2023. Pegatron assembles Apple and Microsoft products. Bridgestone invested $1.2 billion in tire manufacturing. Japanese firms — Kyocera, Fuji Xerox, Yazaki — fill the Nomura and VSIP industrial parks. This is niche construction through policy design: Haiphong didn't wait for comparative advantage to emerge, it engineered conditions (tax incentives, port proximity, industrial zoning) that made locating there economically irrational to refuse.
The biological parallel is the mycorrhizal network that connects forest trees: Haiphong functions as a nutrient hub in Vietnam's northern manufacturing ecosystem, channelling FDI, components, and logistics between global supply chains and the assembly operations concentrated in Bac Ninh and Thai Nguyen. Remove the port node, and the network of electronics factories north of Hanoi loses its connection to global shipping.