Under Vietnamese Investment Law, foreign investors are not required to cooperate with Vietnamese partners when conducting investment activities in most business lines.

However, if the business line that foreign investors intend to conduct is on the list of sectors and trades in which foreign investors are subject to conditional market access, the foreign investors need to meet the requirements prescribed by law, and cooperation with Vietnamese partners is one of the mandatory requirements.

Fees and charges when establishing a company in Vietnam are specified in Circular No. 47/2019/TT-BTC, including:

• Fee for publishing business registration content: 100,000 VND
• Business registration fee: 50,000 VND. However, businesses that register their businesses online are exempt from the business registration fees.

Besides fees and charges mentioned above, foreign investors may also have to pay for other expenses such as engraving of corporate seals, digital signatures, issuance of electronic invoices, etc.

Before carrying out business registration procedures, foreign investors need to carry out procedures for granting an Investment Registration Certificate at the investment registration agency. Therefore, the time to carry our business registration procedures in Vietnam is as follows:

• Settlement time for issuance of Investment Registration Certificate: 15 working days from the date of receipt of the investor's request for an Investment Registration Certificate, for investment projects not subject to investment policy approval.
• Settlement time for issuance of Certificate of Business Registration: 03 working days from the date of receipt of valid application.

Under Circular No. 16/2020/TT-NHNN, it is mandatory to meet directly with the customer or the customer's legal representative to agree to open and use a payment account.

However, the law still stipulates the case of opening an account without a face-to-face meeting with an individual customer in a foreign country. In this case, the bank will have to verify the customer identification information through the correspondent bank or an intermediary and must ensure to verify accuracy of the customer opening the account and take full responsibility for identification and verification of customer opening payment.

Under Vietnamese law, the title of Director is a company manager and executive who is responsible for running the company's day-to-day business operations. However, the law does not require that the Director must always reside in Vietnam, except for the case that the Director is concurrently the legal representative of the enterprise and the company has only one legal representative. Limited liability companies and joint stock companies may have one or more legal representatives. Enterprises only need to have at least one legal representative residing in Vietnam. When there is only one legal representative remaining in Vietnam, this person must, when leaving Vietnam, authorize in writing another individual residing in Vietnam to exercise the rights and perform the obligations of the legal representative.