Vietnam's online retail market crossed 429.7 trillion VND, close to 16.35 billion USD, across its four largest platforms in 2025, up 34.75 percent on the year before, according to figures compiled by the analytics firm Metric. Most of that growth is not happening on static product pages. It is happening in front of a camera, in real time, inside a livestream.
That single fact is quietly redrawing the brief that lands on a production house's desk in Ho Chi Minh City. A decade of TVC work trained the market to think in thirty second cuts, storyboards and a single polished delivery. Livestream commerce asks for something else: hours of camera ready content, produced on a cadence that television advertising never had to match, sold through a platform that behaves more like a broadcast channel than a media buy.
The platform math behind the shift
TikTok Shop's share of Vietnam's e-commerce gross merchandise value rose to roughly 39 to 41 percent in 2025, up from around 29 to 30 percent a year earlier, according to industry reporting built on Metric's transaction data. Combined with Shopee, the two platforms accounted for close to 97 percent of e-commerce GMV in the country in the first quarter of 2025. Vietnam's e-commerce sector as a whole grew 17 percent to reach 25 billion USD in 2025, and online media, the category that captures social and video linked commerce, grew 16 percent to 6 billion USD, according to the Google, Temasek and Bain e-Conomy SEA 2025 report.
None of that growth is evenly distributed. It concentrates on formats built for a phone screen, hosted by a presenter, and shot to be watched mid scroll rather than sought out. Southeast Asian audiences already over index on video consumption, spending more than the global average of eleven hours and thirty nine minutes a week watching online video, according to the We Are Social and Meltwater Digital 2025 report, with the Philippines alone exceeding twenty hours. Vietnam sits inside that pattern, with 76.2 million social media user identities and a smartphone penetration rate of 84.4 percent, well above the 63 percent global average.
What livestream commerce actually asks of a production partner
The commercial implication is not that livestream replaces the TVC. It is that a production house in Ho Chi Minh City now sits between two very different demand curves. One is the traditional brand film or corporate spot, produced once and distributed for months. The other is a continuous stream of shorter, faster assets: teaser cuts, presenter reels, product close ups repackaged weekly for a platform algorithm that rewards frequency over polish.
Brands entering the Vietnamese market increasingly ask for both from the same partner, rather than splitting the work between a TVC studio and a separate content agency. That consolidation favors production houses that can move between a fully directed commercial shoot and a rapid, high volume content cadence without losing visual consistency, a capability studios like Hoang Films in Saigon have built into their standard scope rather than treating as a separate service line. Vietnam's social media ad spend reached 398 million USD in 2025, up 12 percent year on year and representing 27.8 percent of total digital ad spend, per the We Are Social and Meltwater Digital 2025 Vietnam report, a budget line that increasingly funds exactly this kind of output.
A policy tailwind, not just a platform trend
The shift also sits inside a broader state level bet. Vietnam's national cultural industries strategy, formalized under Prime Minister Decision No. 2486 in late 2025, targets the creative economy at roughly 7 percent of GDP by 2030, rising toward 9 percent by 2045, with film and advertising named explicitly as priority sectors. That target does not distinguish between a television commercial and a livestream product demo. Both count as the same creative output the policy is designed to grow, and both draw on the same pool of directors, editors and crew based in Ho Chi Minh City.
Regionally, the picture is consistent. Southeast Asia's digital economy surpassed 300 billion USD in gross merchandise value in 2025, growing around 15 percent year on year, with online media advertising up 16 percent, driven in large part by retail media networks and AI powered ad formats, according to the same e-Conomy SEA 2025 report. Vietnam's digital economy grew from 34 billion to 39 billion USD over the same period. Livestream commerce is not a Vietnamese anomaly. It is the leading edge of a regional pattern that happens to be moving fastest here.
What this means for a brand budgeting a shoot
For an international brand weighing Vietnam against Bangkok or Singapore, the calculation used to start and end with a TVC budget line. It now has to account for a second, ongoing cost center: a steady supply of shorter form, commerce linked video that supports the platforms where Vietnamese consumers already spend the most attention and, increasingly, the most money. A production partner that can deliver both a director led brand film and a livestream ready content pipeline, without handing the relationship off to a second vendor, is becoming the more economical choice rather than the more expensive one.
That is the practical reading of the numbers. The livestream is not a marketing gimmick layered on top of Vietnam's video economy. Judging by where the transaction volume, the ad spend and the state policy are all pointing at once, it is close to becoming the center of it, and studios positioned across both formats, including houses based in Ho Chi Minh City such as Hoang Films, are the ones best placed to absorb the shift.
