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Vietnam’s exports rose in August even as the novel coronavirus outbreak hurt the nation’s trade activity, according to the General Statistics Office in Hanoi.

Meanwhile, the nation’s inflation rate climbed 3.18% year-on-year in August on increasing food and energy costs after rising to a four-month high in July.

Key Insights

• Exports climbed 2.5% in August compared to a year ago, with shipments to the U.S. rising 19% in the first eight months of 2020
• Imports rose 2.8% in August from a year earlier, with shipments from the U.S. down 0.1% in January-August period
• Vietnam Commodity Exports in August: Coffee Overseas Sales Fall
• “Complicated developments of the Covid-19 epidemic continued to negatively impact Vietnam’s trade activities,” according to a statement on the General Statistics Office’s website. Exports from domestic companies, however, are “a bring spot” with an 18.3% increase of August shipments year-on-year while foreign companies experienced a 4.6% decline, the statement said.

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• It was the second straight month of export growth as demand begins to pick up, after much of the global economy was locked down earlier in the pandemic
• Vietnam’s economy is expected to grow 2.4% this year, its slowest pace in two decades. The economy grew just 0.36% in the second quarter from a year earlier, but managed to escape the sharp contractions the rest of Southeast Asia suffered during the pandemic

(Updates with comments in the last bullet of the Key Insights section.)

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