> VN is "Communist" the same way the DPRK is "Democratic".

No, it's different. Vietnam is still a one party communist country and the utilities are publicly run - with all the bureaucracy and incompetence that goes along with it. The state owned enterprises haven't changed that much since Doi Moi.

> This isn't it. The issue is the capacity doesn't exist.

There is clearly capacity for one company to lower demand by more and "sell" it to another which is what the message I replied to was alluding to.

My comment was that while possible, the public utility likely had a blank stare on their face when asked about it.

> The state owned enterprises are run very similarly

Yea, but they are not as singular in control of the economy as they were before Doi Moi.

Just having state owned companies does not make a country communist.

Utilties are state owned (EVN) but the capacity infra is private owned in part or majority.

Also, foreign private sector players like Mitsubishi, Chubu Electric, and POSCO Electric are significant players in the VNese sector by building capacity and significant or majority ownership stakes in power projects, especially because Vietnam has much more stringent FTAs with SK and Japan compared to China.

If Vietnam attempts Chinese style forced JVs, foreign players will return to investing in Thailand, Indonesia, Phillipines, or India.

> There is clearly capacity for one company to lower demand by more and another less which is what the message I was replying to

This by definition is a lack of capacity, because enough capacity was not built, and that was because a lot of us foreigners became much more cautious of financing projects in Vietnam by 2021-23.

> The state owned enterprises haven't changed that much since Doi Moi

I strongly disagree. Significant stakes in the SoEs are now owned by foreign (mostly Japanese, Korean, and HK) companies after the FTAs in the mid-2010s, and at least on the banking and finance side it has professionalized - not to the level in Indonesia or Phillipines, let alone China, but it's getting there.

Your reply seems to be addressing points I’m not making.

> Yea, but they are not as singular in control of the economy as they were before Doi Moi.

That’s not relevant when we are talking about the public utilities, which the government controls.

> Just having state owned companies does not make a country communist.

I never said it does. I said having a one party state run by a communist party gives insights into the government and hence the public utilities.

> Utilties are state owned (EVN) but the capacity infra is private owned in part or majority.

The Vietnam government is happy to take your money but it doesn’t mean you’ll have say over how the SOE is run (hence the blanket request to reduce demand).

Or just the fact you get to bang your head against a wall for a while trying to navigate the state bureaucracy (if unwilling to buy some important people some coffee).

> This by definition is a lack of capacity

Capacity isn’t relevant to sharing of existing capacity. Whatever the capacity is or however much it wasn’t developed, there is still an opportunity for one company to “horse trade” capacity with another company.

I think we're arguing past each other, or at least have are operating with different assumptions.

The utility EVN and its subsidiaries is fairly hands off because of incompetence and corruption.

What ended up happening was most of the regional utilities went broke, and consolidated together, but are still kinda broke, so maintenance is weak and construction of capacity isn't the greatest, yet demand was only growing.

To solve this issue, there were some additional reforms pushed in the mid-2010s along with the FTAs skewed in Japan and South Korea's favor to allow majority ownership of capacity and infra by foreign players (most of whom are Japanese, Korean, and increasingly Chinese).

The utility EVN doesn't have a make or break stake in most of these JVs, and unlike China or even India, cannot push back, because VN just isn't a large enough market to justify those headaches.

The state capacity in VN sucks, but I think you are automatically assuming stuff in Vietnam works the same way as it does in China. It does not, because VN isn't the same size of market that China is, and the largest investors in the Vietnamese market (Japan, South Korea, China) can make Vietnam's life hell if they make it too business unfriendly. This has already started with Korean FDI increasingly moving to PH and TH recently.

I'm just speaking from mine and my SO's experience on this.

Vietnam still has many elements of communist rule, just like China. The economy is largely controlled by state enterprises, often run by incompetent and corrupt bureaucrats.

Private players often get hampered by these horribly run state enterprises. There's also the issue of pervasive corruption that ruins everything it touches.

Just having significant SoEs doesn't make a country "Communist". By those standards so are Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and India.

I've done a lot of work within VN and my SO is herself VNese, so I've had the opportunity to travel and meet with operators there.

Most of the capacity that is built is done so by private players. While there are still a couple oversized SoEs, they cannot compete with the much larger Japanese, South Korean, Singaporean, and Chinese players because Vietnam has FTAs with all those countries.