Vietnam and Thailand end up side by side on almost every Southeast Asian shortlist. Similar populations, both growing, both routinely described as the next step after Singapore. On the numbers that decide an entry, they are not similar at all.
The headline figures are close. The composition is not.
| Vietnam | Thailand | |
|---|---|---|
| Product records | 54,032 | 82,300 |
| Distinct manufacturers | 7,134 | 12,961 |
| Registered only there | 30.8% | 32.7% |
| Also hold US or EU | 57.0% | 46.6% |
| Records per manufacturer | 7.6 | 6.3 |
Both are middling on how local the field is — around a third of manufacturers appear nowhere else, which puts them well clear of China's 88% and well behind Singapore's 9%. But 57% of Vietnam's registered manufacturers also hold a US or EU registration against 46.6% of Thailand's. Vietnam's field is meaningfully more international.
That runs against the usual assumption, which has Thailand as the more developed, more Western-facing market. On who is actually registered, Vietnam is the one where you will recognise more of the names.
What that means in practice
A more international field cuts both ways. It means the competitive set is legible to you — you can benchmark against companies whose products and pricing you already understand, and a distributor there has handled foreign manufacturers before. It also means less room to be the novel foreign option, because you are one of many.
Thailand's larger, more domestically weighted field is the opposite trade. More local competition you cannot easily assess, and correspondingly more room for a genuinely differentiated product to stand out.
The tiebreaker most people never look at
Both markets run substantial public procurement, and Vietnam's is unusually visible. We hold nearly 14,000 tender records for Vietnam — award-level detail on what was bought and by whom.
That is a materially better demand signal than any market-size projection. A tender history tells you the real purchase cadence in your category, the specification language buyers actually write, and which distributor keeps winning. If your device is one that hospitals buy through tender rather than through a rep, this is the single most useful thing you can look at before choosing, and almost nobody does.
The question that outranks both
In both markets a foreign manufacturer cannot hold its own registration — it goes to a local entity, and your access is attached to them. So "Vietnam or Thailand" is downstream of a better question: in which of the two can you find a partner who will genuinely push your product, and what happens to your registration if that relationship ends?
Answer that first. The market comparison is real and worth doing, but a well-chosen market with the wrong partner loses to a second-choice market with the right one, every time.