Your first 30 days in Ho Chi Minh City: a week-by-week checklist for a new operation

Before you land: the two-week head start

Three things have long lead times and can all run before anyone arrives. Start legalisation of parent-company documents, because notarisation, consular legalisation and certified translation take two to four weeks. Book a serviced apartment for the first month rather than a hotel, because it gives you a working address, a kitchen and a monthly invoice. And put your shortlist of meetings in the diary with a buffer: an introduction meeting in Ho Chi Minh City rarely lasts less than ninety minutes and traffic between District 1 and Bình Dương can take two hours each way.

Week 1: arrive, register, understand the geography

• Register temporary residence where you are staying. The landlord or serviced-apartment operator files it with the ward police; confirm it was actually done and keep the confirmation.
• Get a local SIM and set up Zalo. This is the working communication channel for suppliers, drivers, landlords and staff. Add WhatsApp for head office.
• Open a personal bank account if you will be here more than a few months, and start the company account paperwork the same week.
• Drive the commute you are about to commit to. Do it at 8am and at 5:30pm, from the districts your staff would live in to the site you are considering. The map lies; the traffic does not. Our district-by-district city guide is written for exactly this.
• Meet two service providers per function that you will need immediately: accountant, customs broker, recruiter, equipment supplier. Meeting two of each is not indecision, it is a price and capability benchmark.

Week 2: money, paperwork and the site shortlist

• Push the licence and the capital account together. The investment registration certificate and the enterprise registration certificate come first; the direct investment capital account follows and needs the legal representative in person. Do not wait for one to finish before starting the other.
• Set up VAT e-invoicing. Choose a provider, register the invoice template with the tax authority and test one invoice. Everything downstream, from expense claims to customer payments, depends on this working.
• Visit three industrial parks or offices, not one. Ask each for the all-in monthly cost: rent, management fee, electricity tariff, water, waste treatment, and what the landlord charges for changes to the space. Ask which tenants are already there; neighbours tell you about power stability and labour supply faster than a brochure does.
• Get the HS codes for anything you will import and check whether an EVFTA, CPTPP, RCEP or UKVFTA certificate of origin brings the duty to zero. This changes landed cost more than negotiating the unit price.

Week 3: people and the first real work

• Start hiring the first two roles only. Usually an administrator or office manager who can handle Vietnamese paperwork, and one senior technical person. Everything else waits until they are in place, because they will help you hire the rest.
• Benchmark salaries twice. Ask a recruiter and ask a peer company in the same park. Electronics and semiconductor salaries in Ho Chi Minh City move quickly and a stale benchmark costs you the candidate.
• Move your team out of hotels. Serviced apartments for assignments under six months, family apartments or houses for relocations, and always ask whether the landlord can issue a company VAT invoice.
• Get instruments on the bench. If commissioning or incoming inspection starts within weeks, rent locally rather than importing: an oscilloscope, thermal camera or power quality analyser can be delivered the next day with a valid calibration certificate. See the rental fleet and the factory setup checklist.

Week 4: prove the chain end to end

Before the month closes, run one complete transaction through the whole system, however small. Order something, receive it, get the VAT e-invoice, book it in the accounts, and pay the supplier from the company account. That single loop exposes every missing piece: a tax code typo on the invoice template, a bank signatory who is not registered, a supplier who cannot invoice your entity. It is far cheaper to find those on a small order than on your first production shipment.

Then hold a thirty-day review with head office covering four numbers: cash spent versus plan, the licence and account status, the hiring pipeline, and the date of first production or first sale. Bring the risks you found, not just progress.

What to leave until month two

Resist signing a long office lease, importing capital equipment, hiring a full team, or committing to a distributor in month one. Every one of those decisions is cheaper and better informed after four weeks on the ground. The exceptions are anything with a long lead time and the things that block others: legalisation, licences, bank accounts and e-invoicing.

A note on timing

If your first thirty days would overlap Tết, move them. The lunar new year closes most of the country for one to two weeks and runs at reduced speed for about two weeks either side. Government offices, banks and factories all slow at once, which is the worst possible month to be waiting on a licence.

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