Before deciding to invest, a foreign investor typically makes several trips to Vietnam: researching the market, visiting plants, meeting partners, negotiating and signing memoranda of understanding. These trips use business visas and look like “going to work” to an outsider, but legally they are business activities, not employment. This article draws the line between a scouting trip and work requiring a permit, under the current Decree 219/2025/ND-CP framework. This article covers only labour documents for an inbound scouting trip to Vietnam; market-survey content and Chinese investor expectations are the separate subject of article EXP-6485 in the same assignment wave, and investment-control rules when Vietnamese investors invest into Australia (FIRB) are in article EXP-3962 on this site — the three articles do not substitute for one another.
1. Why research, negotiation and MOU signing are not permit-requiring work
The work permit regime regulates foreigners working in Vietnam for an employer — that is, holding a job position, an employment relationship, or supplying labour on Vietnamese territory. An investor travelling in a personal capacity or as a representative of an investing organisation to study the market, appraise a project, negotiate terms, sign a memorandum of understanding or a framework agreement occupies no labour position in Vietnam: no Vietnamese employer pays him for work in Vietnam, and he holds no position in a Vietnamese unit’s staffing structure. These activities therefore do not trigger the work permit process. In the same logic, Article 7 of Decree 219/2025/ND-CP includes the case of a foreign worker entering Vietnam to establish a commercial presence as not subject to work permit issuance — the pre-investment phase is treated by labour law separately from the operating phase with real employment.
2. Visas and entry documents for a scouting trip
The correct document for a scouting investor is a business-category entry document under immigration law (a DN-symbol visa for persons entering to work with enterprises in Vietnam, or visa exemption where the nationality qualifies and the trip is short). Note carefully: the DN visa is an entry document serving business activities and dealings with enterprises; it is not a work permit and does not need to be one, because scouting activity is not employment. Where a trip lasts weeks with a dense schedule alongside partners, the investor should carry a purpose-explanation file: the Vietnamese partner’s or unit’s invitation letter, the work programme, meeting minutes and project documents — this file evidences the business, scouting character if immigration or labour authorities ask. The simple governance rule: the purpose declared on entry, the actual activities on the trip, and the explanation file must match.
3. The red line: when a scouting trip becomes work
Three groups of conduct cross the line into permit-requiring work. First, directly performing the work of a position: operating a production line, coding for a Vietnamese company’s project, treating patients, teaching for fees at a Vietnamese institution. Second, managing personnel: assigning work, recording attendance, disciplining, signing approvals like a resident manager of a Vietnamese unit — even under the label “investor’s adviser”. Third, providing services to a Vietnamese unit’s clients over an extended period, replacing staff the unit should have hired. When any of the three appears, the analysis moves fully into the work permit regime or the corresponding non-issuance case (person establishing a commercial presence, or the under-90-days-per-year case in Article 7 of Decree 219/2025 where conditions are met). An investor who is simultaneously a shareholder of an already-established company in Vietnam must return to the capital-and-title analysis in the owner and capital-member articles in this section.
4. The correct roadmap from scouting to operations
A typical investment project passes through four documentation phases. The scouting phase: business entry documents, no work permit. The establishment phase: the investor and persons sent to establish the commercial presence fall within the non-issuance case in Article 7 of Decree 219/2025, with the corresponding confirmation procedure. The pre-operation phase: managers and experts recruited or seconded must hold position-based work permits before their start dates, through the Article 22 process in Decree 219/2025 — the phase where projects most often slip, because diploma legalisation and judicial records take time. The operating phase: work permits, investor or labour residence cards, and renewals managed on one unified timeline. The key point is that the investor should plan labour documentation right from the scouting phase rather than treating it as an operating-phase task — because when the plant needs experts present on opening day, there is no time left to run files from scratch.
This article has been quality-reviewed by the FLAW AI Legal Council