Vietnam North-South Expressway PPP bids

Xuân Trường Construction has asked the prime minister and the Ministry of Construction to let it invest in expanding the Mai Sơn-Cam Lộ section, a 415-kilometer stretch linking eight subprojects from four lanes to six under a BOT structure. The company says the project would cost 72,185 billion dong and wants toll collection across the route from the start of the upgrade to reduce reliance on commercial borrowing.

That proposal follows a similar request from Đèo Cả Group, underscoring that domestic builders see the expressway as a rare toll-road tollbooth with scale. The companies are effectively competing not just to lay asphalt, but to lock in decades of concession-style revenue on a corridor that is central to Vietnam’s logistics network and industrial geography.

On the southern half of the route, a consortium comprising HCMC Infrastructure Investment, IMIC Infrastructure Construction and CII Public-Private Partnership has proposed completing the Quảng Ngãi-Nha Trang and Vĩnh Hảo-Dầu Giây sections, also via PPP and without state budget capital. The group estimates total investment at about 93,000 billion dong, including roughly 18,000 billion dong returned to the state, in exchange for toll rights from Jan. 1, 2028. The project would run from 2026 to 2030 if approved.

The ministry has already outlined a broader expansion plan for 15 public-investment segments totaling 966 kilometers, with the northern package alone expected to cost 72,185 billion dong and the southern package 78,224 billion dong. In both cases, the state has signaled a willingness to consider PPP participation, but the structure remains important: under existing rules, toll revenue from budget-financed expressways goes to the state budget, while the public contribution to PPP projects must come from medium-term public investment funds.

That tension is what makes the current wave of proposals economically important. Vietnam needs faster capacity expansion on its main north-south artery, but the budget cannot fund every lane-addition on its own. By shifting to PPP and BOT models, Hanoi can crowd in private capital, accelerate execution and preserve fiscal space for other priorities. For builders, the upside is not just construction margins; it is the chance to own a toll stream tied to a long-duration, high-traffic national corridor.

For investors, the winners are the firms with political access, engineering scale and balance-sheet credibility. The losers are public budgets that lose toll upside, and smaller contractors without the financing capacity to underwrite multiyear concessions. If approvals move forward, the most interesting trade is not merely in concrete and equipment suppliers, but in infrastructure operators that can monetize traffic growth, refinancing cycles and concession extensions.

The next catalyst is regulatory. If the Ministry of Construction and the government endorse one of these PPP structures, the market will begin pricing the expressway not as a one-off project, but as a repeatable capital-allocation framework for Vietnam’s road network. That would open the door to more private participation in strategic infrastructure — and create the kind of toll-road economics investors should be positioned for before consensus catches up.