The Long Thanh International Airport, a large-scale infrastructure project that has been underway in Vietnam for several years, is reportedly nearing completion. According to reports, most of the major construction will be substantially finished by the end of the year, with commercial operations targeted for 2026. This mega-airport, which will eventually be the largest in Vietnam, has been long in the making.
Ho Chi Minh City is Vietnam’s largest megalopolis and commercial center. The existing airport, Tan Son Nhat, was built decades ago and is extremely over-capacity, so the government approved the construction of a new, much larger airport in 2020. The new airport, located on 5,000 hectares of land in Long Thanh, will eventually be big enough to handle 100 million passengers a year. The project could cost more than $13 billion.
To make this more manageable, development has been broken into three phases. The first phase, which got the official greenlight from the government in 2020, is targeting a capacity of 25 million passengers a year at a cost of around $4.6 billion. It was supposed to be finished by now, but has encountered numerous delays.
For one, the project received final approval to proceed just as a global pandemic was beginning. The timing could not have been worse for a multi-billion-dollar undertaking involving several international firms. It has also taken a long time to clear the land, as land acquisition in Vietnam is a lengthy process that has been a major drag on other big infrastructure projects like the Ho Chi Minh City metro. Five officials overseeing the process were arrested and charged with violations earlier this year.
Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV) is the main project developer. ACV is majority-owned by the state and operates all of Vietnam’s airports. The plan was for Long Thanh to be developed as a public-private partnership, but there were problems with the first round of bidding for construction contracts in 2022, with many contracts failing to be awarded to any bidders.
The following year, the contracts were re-bid, and the big winner was Vietur, a consortium led by a Turkish firm and which includes several state-owned and private Vietnamese companies. This consortium was awarded a contract worth $1.5 billion, which covers the construction of the main passenger terminal.
With the contracts awarded and under intense pressure from national leaders, the project has lurched rapidly toward completion over the last two years. ACV has started pouring cash into construction, spending just under $1 billion from 2023 to 2024. That figure will be even higher this year, with $469 million spent on construction in the first six months of 2025. These funds are going mainly to Long Thanh, as well as other big-ticket projects like a new passenger terminal at Tan Son Nhat Airport. Despite the delays, things now appear to be moving forward, including big outlays of cash. So, how is all of this being paid for?
As it happens, ACV is a very well-capitalized company. During the pandemic, it kept a lot of liquid assets on their balance sheet, with short-term bank deposits exceeding $1 billion in 2021. It has since been drawing that down to pay for these large capital expenditures, but still had $675 million in short-term investments on the books as of June 2025. The company is also quite profitable, posting net after-tax income of $443 million last year. Much of this is rolled over into new construction.
A consortium of domestic banks announced earlier this year that they had signed an agreement with ACV to provide up to $1.8 billion in credit, but as of mid-2025, the airport operator had not used any of it. According to ACV’s consolidated financial statements, their long-term debt has not increased at all, despite the accelerated pace of construction.
A final challenge facing Vietnam’s new marquee airport is connectivity. Long Thanh is about 40 kilometers away from Ho Chi Minh City itself, and while an expressway connects the two areas, there are no rail links. Plans have been announced to build supporting railway infrastructure, but given how slowly other major rail projects have progressed in recent years, the completion of any airport rail links has to be years away at best.
All of this provides some interesting insights into how Vietnam is building critical infrastructure. The Long Thanh project successfully attracted private foreign involvement, albeit with a bit of a learning curve. The fact that it’s being self-financed is also interesting, although if the airport does proceed as planned all the way to a third phase, at some point, they will need to turn to capital markets or start using that $1.8 billion line of credit for funding. Land acquisition, however, continues to be a major obstacle for this and other projects, and a fully integrated approach to transportation connectivity remains underdeveloped.
