Vietnam – a developing country with a stable political – economic – social environment has become a promising land for many entrepreneurs coming from all over the world. Many of them have started up business and achieved some success. Vietnam has many advantages such as a widely open market, low labor costs, stable economic growth and economy-led policies.With these conditions, foreign investors find Vietnam certainly an attractive investment option and an ideal destination for business.
However, to get into the house we must go through the door. To start a business in Vietnam, or earlier, to conduct a market research or simply just to learn about people, their demands or the actual living and working environment in VN to verify that the whether the place is right for your business idea, you must be in Vietnam. If your nationality doesn’t give you a visa exemption to Vietnam, you have to apply for one.
Nowadays, to obtain visa to Vietnam is not too difficult. If not eligible for exemption, you can directly apply to Vietnam Embassy in your country to get a visa or pay a small service fee to get visa on arrival through many supporting companies. But for some nationalities in the list of immigration restrictions by the government of Vietnam, to get Visa is not easy despite going through the serviced companies. The Nationalities under restricted immigration policy of Vietnam include: Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo, Mozambique, Ghana, Sierra LION, Turkey, Iran, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen.
During our business, we have seen many entrepreneurs from Turkey, Nigeria and Syria who have excellent plan and financial resources capable to invest with small and medium scale in Vietnam, but were not able to even set a foot here due to the restricted immigration policy above. For these independent entrepreneurs, it seems to be extremely hard to obtain an invitation letter as required by Immigration Department for the first coming to VN for the purpose of seeking opportunities, market survey and find partners. Clearly, no matter how big the expectation is, if entrepreneurs cannot enter VN at the first place, it is like the knights already fail even before reaching battle field.
The cases received our help are those who have tried many ways but failed. VN Embassy is not located in any local or neighboring countries (such as Syria) is an example. Many serviced companies also refused to provide visa on arrival service for these special cases. With these entrepreneurs, obstacles seem not to be limited at the normal business start-up issues, but also include the headache of administration procedures of which solutions are unlikely to be found. The key for this problem is to find the right person. Among hundreds of serviced companies, only a few are capable of solving difficult cases like this. Hence, having a local support to find and to be introduced to them is what entrepreneurs really need.
When the visa is in hand, the door is opened, all foreign entrepreneurs now have equal access to the Vietnam market.