More than manufacturing: Vietnam has hopes to become Asia’s next cultural powerhouse

When Justin Bieber headlined Coachella in April, his first concert in four years, the stripped-down performance style made global headlines. Yet in Vietnam, excited social media chatter also focused on the singer’s “Puffa shorts” from Lu’u Dan, an Asian-influenced label founded by Vietnamese American Hung La.

Bieber’s outfit is part of a larger story: Vietnam’s export-dependent economy is beginning to leverage intellectual property to move up the value chain.

Vietnam’s booming cultural scene is sitting between a top-down drive by the government to elevate culture to a policy priority, and a bottom-up push by a generation of young creators empowered by rising consumer spending and cheap internet access. The companies that manage this talent hope that culture, like everything else in Vietnam, can be reengineered as an export product.

Last Year’s Resolution 68 affirmed the private sector as Vietnam’s “most important driving force.” It dominates commentary about General Secretary To Lam’s reform push, dubbed Doi Moi 2.0, a reference to Vietnam’s 1980s economic transformation.

Yet Resolution 80, passed in January, could end up being just as important to the growing cultural economy. The measure established culture as an indispensable foundation of Vietnam’s sustainable development, a coequal pillar alongside the economy, society, and the environment.

“The resolution emphasizes the role of cultural industries in the economic development of the country,” says Duc Khuong Nguyen, a senior fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy and an advisor to the government. Hanoi has long used culture to encourage patriotic feelings and build some cohesion across the country’s 54 ethnic groups, but “recognizing culture as a business is quite recent,” he notes.

Vietnam’s government wants the cultural economy to grow by 10% every year, and make up 7% of GDP by 2030. In the past 12 months, To Lam’s government has announced a new public holiday to celebrate culture; its first-ever national showcase at the Venice Biennale; and the launch of Vietnam Today, an English-language state-owned broadcaster in the mold of China’s CGTN.

The government also broke ground on a number of showstopping construction projects, including a lavish new opera house in Hanoi, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, and a 135,000-seat stadium, set to be the world’s largest upon its completion in 2028.

The cultural scene is also growing from the bottom up. “Vietnam’s pop culture is leaking out through the internet rather than through state-sponsored engineering,” William Lee Adams, a Vietnamese American journalist and cultural commentator, explains. “Twenty years ago people wanted to imitate the Western world; now it’s about reflecting their own lives. The country’s young, digitally connected population has created this creative incubator.”

An additional 23.2 million people are projected to join Vietnam’s middle class by 2030, making it one of the fastest-growing globally. This rising consumer class will eventually “transition the country from ‘make in Vietnam and export to the rest of the world’ to ‘make and sell in Vietnam,’” says Luke Treloar, a partner and strategy group head at KPMG in Vietnam.

Vietnam, with a gross national income (GNI) per capita of around $4,500, is still a relatively poor country compared with Asian cultural powerhouses like South Korea, Japan, or even Thailand. But Adams thinks the country can “bypass the need for money,” thanks to digital infrastructure and a “culturally confident” youth population. “South Korea built its global pop empire after reaching high-income status, but Vietnam is proving you can start producing and exporting culture earlier in your development curve.”

A sudden rise in the popularity of homegrown pop music, or V-pop, is driving growth for pop culture players like Yeah1, DatVietVAC, and POPS. Even bigger companies are getting into the business: Vingroup, one of Vietnam’s biggest conglomerates and No. 26 on the Southeast Asia 500, added culture as a new “core pillar” of its strategy in November.

Yeah1, the country’s first listed media company, reported a 60% revenue jump in 2025, driven by products like its flagship singing-competition reality TV show, Anh Trai Vuot Ngan Chong Gai (Call Me by Fire), which draws live audiences of up to 50,000 people a night and is streamed to millions of fans worldwide. The company recorded 82 billion views across its 200 owned channels last year, according to its annual report.

“By the end of this year I will take my boy band Uprize outside of Vietnam,” Thao Le Phuong, Yeah1’s chairwoman, pledges, referring to a seven-member boy group cultivated through another reality competition show. Uprize is managed by SYE Holdings, a new joint venture between Yeah1 and Sony Music with a focus on international markets.

POPS, another growing Vietnamese music and entertainment company, is preparing to list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and planning its own international expansion. “It’s our duty to recognize the dreams of our artists,” POPS founder Esther Nguyen says.

And that dream is to break out of Vietnam and go global. “Of course our artists want to have resonance in the local market, but their ultimate goal is always: ‘How do I get outside of Vietnam? How do I make it in the U.S.?’” she says.

This article appears in the June/July 2026: Asia issue of  Fortune with the headline “Vietnam’s pop culture takes the stage.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com