Maersk and Hateco agree to study four rail terminals in Vietnam

APM Terminals, Maersk's port operator, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Hateco, a Vietnamese infrastructure group. Together they will study four rail freight terminals in northern Vietnam. One would be at Hai Phong, the main container port of the north, and the other three sites have not been named. The preliminary investment is put at up to $3.5 billion. The agreement does not commit either company to build anything.

Those terminals would sit at the end of a railway that is still being built. The new Lao Cai to Hai Phong line runs 390.9 km from the Chinese border to Lach Huyen. Lach Huyen is the deep-water section of Hai Phong port, and Hateco already runs a container terminal there. The line is single track, costed at about $7.8 billion and due in 2030.

It is already behind. By late June only two of the first five station sites had been handed over, because land clearance was holding up the rest. The main line's feasibility study was sent back for revision after its appraisal in April.

The delay matters because a rail terminal is sized by the freight the railway brings it. In Vietnam that freight barely exists. Rail carries 0.18% of the country's freight, according to Ministry of Construction figures. Until the new line reaches the quay, Lach Huyen is served by the expressway and by barge. For now, a box moving between Hanoi and Hai Phong stays on a truck or a barge.

So what does the $3.5 billion buy? The partners do not describe it the same way. The Vietnamese government portal gives it as the preliminary total for the projects the two sides plan. Maersk, as Reuters reported it, gives a range of $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion for total investment in Vietnam by both partners. Their existing projects (the Hai Phong terminal, Lien Chieu in Da Nang and a river terminal in Hanoi) come to roughly $2.2 billion. If the range includes them, the rail network itself is at most about $1.3 billion. Nobody has published a capacity, a site or a phase for any of the four terminals. The figure was set before any of that, so it works as a ceiling.

I would still take the memorandum seriously. These two partners have turned agreements into berths before, and the Hai Phong terminal opened in April 2025. The timetable is still the railway's, though, and the terminals cannot work without it.

The thing to watch is approval of the main line's revised feasibility study, which was sent back in April. Until it is approved and the construction contracts are awarded, the 2030 date is only a target.