Deregulation packages are usually easier to read by what they leave alone. Luật sửa đổi, bổ sung một số điều của Luật Đầu tư, số 24/2026/QH16 cuts 62 lines of business out of Việt Nam’s licensing list — a genuinely large cut — and the tech sector is almost entirely untouched by it. Every line covering the data economy survives. One of them comes out wider than it went in.
What the document is
The law was passed by the Quốc hội khóa XVI at its Kỳ họp không thường lệ thứ Nhất on 24 August 2026, and announced by presidential order at the Văn phòng Chủ tịch nước press conference on 10 September 2026, where Thứ trưởng Bộ Tài chính Lê Tấn Cận presented it as one of fifteen laws from that session. It takes effect on 1 March 2027, except khoản 1 Điều 1 and khoản 1 Điều 3 — the nitrous-oxide provisions — which start on 1 January 2027.
It is a short statute: three điều amending the Luật Đầu tư số 143/2025/QH15. Điều 1 does two things. It adds a new điểm m to khoản 1 Điều 6, banning the sale of N₂O for human inhalation (the “bóng cười” recreational trade) outside medical, food-technology, testing and scientific-research uses — the twelfth entry on the prohibited list. And, in one clause, it replaces Phụ lục IV in its entirety with a new annex.
That second clause is the whole story. The old Phụ lục IV ran to 198 conditional business lines. The new one runs to 137. Official figures put the change at 62 lines cut and 14 amended, with the policy framing being a shift “từ tiền kiểm sang hậu kiểm” — from licensing at the gate to inspection after the fact.
What actually left the list
The removals are concentrated in professional services and physical commodities: kinh doanh dịch vụ kế toán (accountancy services), hành nghề đấu giá tài sản, hành nghề thừa phát lại, insolvency asset administration, kinh doanh rượu, kinh doanh khí, kinh doanh khoáng sản, duty-free retail, white-asbestos products of the Serpentine group, occupational-safety training services, paintball guns, priority-vehicle signalling equipment, and petroleum operations.
Two removals matter to technology businesses. Public trò chơi điện tử service points — the arcade and game-shop licence — are gone. And so is “Hoạt động mua bán hàng hóa và các hoạt động liên quan trực tiếp đến mua bán hàng hóa của nhà cung cấp dịch vụ nước ngoài tại Việt Nam”, the goods-trading licence for foreign service suppliers, which has long been the friction point for offshore sellers operating into the Vietnamese market.
Only one line is genuinely new: STT 137, “Hoạt động dịch vụ hỗ trợ cấp thị thực của cơ sở kinh doanh được ủy quyền” — authorised visa-support services.
What stayed, and the one that grew
Read the tail of the new annex and the intent is plain. Entries 133 to 136 are the data economy, intact:
- 133. Kinh doanh sản phẩm, dịch vụ trung gian, phân tích, tổng hợp dữ liệu
- 134. Kinh doanh dịch vụ sàn dữ liệu — data exchange platforms
- 135. Hoạt động cung cấp dịch vụ liên quan đến tài sản mã hóa — crypto-asset services
- 136. Dịch vụ xử lý dữ liệu cá nhân — personal-data processing services
Entry 133 is the interesting one. Luật 143/2025 carried these as two separate lines — STT 194 “Kinh doanh sản phẩm, dịch vụ trung gian dữ liệu” and STT 195 “Kinh doanh sản phẩm, dịch vụ phân tích, tổng hợp dữ liệu”. The new annex folds them into a single entry reading “trung gian, phân tích, tổng hợp dữ liệu”. Consolidating two licences into one is administratively simpler, but it also means a firm doing any of brokering, analysing or aggregating data now sits under one undivided conditional heading rather than being able to point at the narrower of two.
Elsewhere in the list the technology entries are all still there, with new numbers: e-commerce platform operation and electronic-contract certification (36), postal services (66), telecommunications services (67), dịch vụ tin cậy (68), social network services (71), online games over telecom and Internet networks (72), pay television (73), aggregated electronic information pages (74), electronic authentication services (76), kinh doanh sản phẩm, dịch vụ an ninh mạng (77), mật mã dân sự (79), payment intermediation and mobile money (130), and credit information services (131).
Who this affects and what to do
For a Vietnamese or foreign company whose licence was struck off the list, Điều 3 khoản 3 is the operative text: from 1 March 2027 you may operate without meeting investment and business conditions, and existing permits stay valid to their stated expiry with no renewal required. Điều 2 khoản 3 also directs ministries to put alternative management measures in place, where necessary, for de-listed lines before that date — so “deregulated” will in some sectors mean “regulated differently”, and the replacement instruments are worth watching between now and March.
For anyone in data services, crypto or personal-data processing, nothing loosens. The conditions themselves live in sector decrees rather than in the Investment Law, and the recent stream of them — the data-exchange rules, the data-analysis service notification regime, the personal-data sanctions decree — now has an unambiguous statutory anchor. If you are building in this space, the planning assumption for 2027 is that you are a licensed activity, not a permissionless one.
N₂O traders have a harder deadline. Contracts for recreational supply terminate by operation of law on 1 January 2027, with a maximum 45 days to liquidate them under civil law.
Open questions
The law does not say which conditions will attach to the merged data line at STT 133, or whether the merger changes the substantive requirements that applied separately to intermediation and to analytics — that will come from the implementing decrees. It is also not yet clear how far the removal of the foreign-supplier goods-trading licence reaches in practice, given that e-commerce platform operation remains conditional at STT 36 and the customs regime for platform sales tightens separately from 1 March 2027. And khoản 3 Điều 2’s “alternative management measures” are undefined in scope: a ministry could replace a licence with a light notification duty or with something close to the old regime under a different name.
Sources
- Luật Đầu tư sửa đổi 2026, số 24/2026/QH16 — full text (LuatVietnam)
- Danh mục ngành, nghề đầu tư kinh doanh có điều kiện — Xây dựng chính sách, pháp luật (Chính phủ)
- Công bố Luật sửa đổi, bổ sung một số điều của Luật Đầu tư — Thời báo Tài chính Việt Nam
- Luật Đầu tư sửa đổi cắt giảm 62 ngành, nghề kinh doanh có điều kiện — Công Luận
- Điểm mới Luật Đầu tư sửa đổi 2026 — Luật Nguyễn
- Luật Đầu tư 2025, số 143/2025/QH15 — Phụ lục IV (bản trước sửa đổi)
This post is general information, not legal advice.