Vietnam’s shrimp exports remained relatively flat in 2025 after strong growth in 2024, with the first several months of 2026 indicating it may be on an upward swing again.
Data from the Vietnam Association of Seafood Export Partners presented during the Global Shrimp Forum – gathered by forum managing director and co-founder Willem van der Pijl – showed Vietnam's shrimp exports increased slightly from 303,458 metric tons (MT) in 2024 to 309,022 MT in 2025. That growth came after a big increase from 2024 to 2025, when exports grew by 30,000 MT.
“Vietnam had a very strong year in 2024 from 2023 to 2024, but last year the situation was different,” van der Pijl said. “Vietnam has had disease challenges, maybe the most in Southeast Asia, which resulted in flat growth.”
So far in 2026, that situation has been improving with the country’s shrimp exports in Q1 increasing by 12 percent. Its exports in April and May – the most recent months for which there is any data – are also on an upward trajectory with an increase of 8 percent.
Projecting further forward, at 10 percent growth Vietnam could see its shrimp exports reach 340,000 MT in 2026, according to van der Pijl.
A lot of Vietnam’s export statistics should also be examined more closely, van de Pijl said, as the raw numbers don’t always tell the full story of the country’s shrimp production. Vietnam’s labeling of value-added doesn’t encompass all of the different ways the country processes the species, which means its export statistics end up understating the value of its exports.
Even with that understatement, shrimp that has undergone multiple processing steps is still more than half of Vietnam’s export statistics, he said.
“The value added is almost 50 percent of the total export basket in Vietnam, but if we really refined it and restricted it, it might be even more,” van der Pijl said.
That strong prevalence of value-added products also speaks to Vietnam’s difficulty in exporting raw and lesser-processed products compared to other producers, van der Pijl said.
“This says a lot about the competitiveness of Vietnam on the raw side, on the conventional side. I think that Vietnam really struggles to compete in Europe or in the U.S.,” van der Pijl said.
Van Vu, the CEO of TOMOTA, said the export statistics aren’t reflecting the reality of shrimp production in Vietnam.
“The export data doesn’t really reflect the production in Vietnam,” Vu said. “The major reason for that is we have a very, very strong domestic market for fresh or live shrimp.”
Vu said that many Vietnamese people, and tourists visiting the country, have a preference for live shrimp, something that is clear in the way the species is presented to customers.
“When you go to a restaurant, you will see glass tanks with shrimp swimming in the tank, and every wholesale market, or small market, or local market, people will come to buy fresh shrimp or live shrimp,” he said.
That high local demand is also partially why Vietnam’s exports lean towards more heavily processed products, as domestic demand for minimally-processed products is high enough to absorb most production. Vu estimates the domestic market for shrimp could be as high as 200,000 MT, or even more, based on the demand for shrimp feed in the country and the amount of post larvae Vietnam produced in 2025.
“One wholesale market in Ho Chi Minh city will sell something between 200 to 300 MT of live shrimp per night, and there’s another one similar to that in Hanoi,” he said.
