How vietnam leaving Philippines behind.

During the Noynoy Aquino era, we are growing at a pace that’s ahead of Vietnam. Today, 10 years later, the script has dramatically flipped. Let’s count the many ways Vietnam is steadily leaving the Philippines behind.

While the Philippines is still waiting for its first subway to partially open by 2032, Vietnam is already expanding multiple metro systems and building new lines across not just one major city, but two: Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.

While we are still planning or doing piecemeal improvements to existing airports and having big environmetal issues on a new gateway airport, Vietnam is opening Long Thanh International Airport by this year with a capacity for 25 million passengers in phase 1 alone with a final capacity of over 100 million passengers when it’s completed.

While our country chooses projects like building an ill-thought bridge to Boracay, Vietnam is breaking ground this year for a $67 billion north–south high-speed railway, its own version of a bullet train spanning the entire country.

While our own DPWH struggles to complete disconnected road projects across the country, Vietnam has already built over 3,800 km of expressways and is pushing toward 5,000 kilometers by 2030.

While we can’t even modernize our fleet of jeepneys that still use diesel engines, Vietnam has built its own EV champion VinFast, producing hundreds of thousands of units and expanding globally, competing head on with BYD and Tesla.

While the Philippines is incentivizing EV imports through tax breaks, Vietnam is building EV factories around the world with up to 950,000-unit annual capacity factories.

While we are still trying to enter the semiconductor space,

Vietnam has already started building its first chip fabrication plant through Viettel.

While the Philippines is growing at mid-single digits and remains consumption-driven, Vietnam is targeting sustained high growth driven by exports and manufacturing. It aims to be the second biggest manufacturing hub next to China by 2029.

While the Philippines builds project-by-project, often delayed or scaled down, or outright mired in corruption, Vietnam is building entire systems of transport, logistics, and manufacturing all at once, all while sentencing to death corrupt politicians and oligarchs.

So you see, at some point, we have to stop calling our fate bad luck or missed opportunities. Because it isn’t accidental. It’s the outcome of choices, elections, policies, and priorities that we made, repeatedly.

And if nothing fundamentally changes in our mindset and our choices, the next ten years won’t just be about being left behind. It’ll be about no longer being in the race at all.