RoK President begins State visit to Vietnam

President Moon Jae-in

This is the first official visit to Vietnam by President Moon Jae-in.

The visit takes place at a time when the Vietnam-RoK Strategic Cooperative Partnership is thriving with regular exchanges of high-level visits and contacts. This is an opportunity for both countries’ leaders to review outcomes in the past years and discuss orientations for the future bilateral relations.

Vietnam affirms to pursue its external policy of independence, self-reliance, muliteralisation and persification of international relations, in which the development of cooperation with the RoK is emphasised.

Vietnam and the RoK established diplomatic ties on December 22, 1992. They set up their comprehensive strategic partnership in August 2001, and agreed to lift the ties to a strategic cooperative partnership in October 2009.

In 2006, an agreement on cooperation between the two legislatures was signed, an important legal document for both sides to develop their friendship and cooperation.

The nations also established important security-defence cooperation mechanisms, including a security dialogue and defence dialogue at the deputy ministerial level.

The Vietnam-RoK free trade agreement, which became effective on December 20, 2015, has opened a new chapter in bilateral economic ties.

The RoK is currently one of Vietnam’s most important economic partners, ranking first in terms of investment, and second in development cooperation, trade and tourism.

Two-way trade jumped from US$500 million in 1992 to US$61.5 billion in 2017, of which US$14.8 billion came from Vietnam’s exports, up 30 percent from the previous year, and US$46.7 billion from the Southeast Asian country’s imports, a year-on-year increase of 45.3 percent.

The two countries are working to raise the turnover to US$100 billion by 2020.

The RoK ranks first among 125 nations and territories pouring capital into Vietnam, with total registered capital hitting US$57.7 billion as of late December 2017.

The eastern Asia country ranks second in terms of the number of tourists to Vietnam. Last year, Vietnam welcomed more than 2 million Korean visitors, a surge of 56.4 percent year-on-year. In January this year, 316,300 Korean tourists visited Vietnam, a year-on-year jump of 84 percent.

Currently, there are more than 112,200 Vietnamese people living in the Republic of Korea, while about 150,000 Koreans are living in Vietnam.