Trade is like water: In Hanoi, DHL makes its case that globalization still delivers
27 Mar 20269 min read
Summary
- The DHL Global Connectedness Report 2026 challenges deglobalisation narratives, showing that cross-border flows of trade, capital, and information remain strong.
- Rather than breaking apart, global trade is reconfiguring—shifting toward emerging hubs like Vietnam that sit between major geopolitical blocs.
- Despite this resilience, the benefits of globalisation are uneven, with cost pressures and policy shifts still felt most directly by consumers.
When John Pearson stood in front of a room of journalists in Dubai last June, he borrowed a line that has become something of a refrain. "Trade is like water," he told the audience gathered for DHL's Geographic Tailwinds Gulf Tour 2025, "It will always find a way." He cited the resilience of trade through Brexit, through the first Trump presidency, through COVID. The message: trade endures.Eight months on, Pearson was at it again. This time in Hanoi, launching the 11th edition of the DHL Global Connectedness Report 2026, the Trade Atlas's sister publication that tracks not just trade but capital, information, and people flows across borders. The venue was deliberate, as the facts tell us. Vietnam, a country whose GDP per capita has climbed from US$400 in 1986 to roughly US$4,000 today, is one of the clearest living arguments that open trade works. And Pearson, CEO of DHL Express, was not about to let that point go unnoticed.The report's headline findings have already made the rounds: globalisation sits at a record-equivalent 25%, and international trade grew faster in 2025 than in any year since 2017. The average distance goods travel hit an all-time high of 5,010 kilometres. Singapore topped the country rankings once more. The data, drawn from over 9 million data points across 180 countries, paints a picture that sits in sharp contrast with the deglobalisation narratives dominating the news cycle.Professor Steven Altman, who leads NYU Stern's research behind the report, said the biggest surprise this year was not what changed but how little did. "This really was an extraordinary year in terms of policy changes, in terms of increases in uncertainty," he told journalists at the Hanoi launch. "And the biggest surprise, really, to me, is how much things didn't change."Altman's data showed that while U.S.-China trade fell from 3.6% of world trade in 2015 to just 2.0% in the first nine months of 2025, the broader pattern was not a fracturing into rival blocs. Trade was shifting towards countries with what he called "more flexible or intermediate geopolitical positions." Countries like India. Or, indeed, like Vietnam.Which brings us back to the room in Hanoi. Pearson opened the conference by noting that DHL Express has been in Vietnam since 1988, just two years into its Doi Moi economic reforms. The company now employs over 2,000 people across the country, with investment totalling US$42 million. Vietnam is one of DHL's GT20 countries, the internal designation for 20 markets expected to grow faster than anywhere else on the planet over the next five years, measured on axes of both speed and scale.Ken Lee, CEO of DHL Express Asia Pacific, offered some sharper context during the panel session. Vietnam is the company's 13th largest market in the region by revenue, he noted. But in profitability? Right at the top.
A consumer’s standpoint
So the macro numbers are flattering. Record globalisation. Record trade distances. A report built on 9 million data points telling us the world is more connected than it has ever been. But there was a question the data, for all its breadth, did not quite reach.
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"What does any of this mean for the person buying the product?"
Prices are rising. Cost of living pressures are real from Hanoi to Hamburg. And the tariff environment, particularly the rolling U.S. actions on Chinese goods, does not get absorbed at the corporate level and vanish. It reaches the shelf. It reaches the checkout.
During the open Q&A session, I put this to the panel directly: with all this data-driven optimism about resilience at the macro level, what happens in the meantime to the consumer on the ground?Nicola Leske, EVP Corporate Communications & Sustainability, understandably noted that consumer protection falls outside their lane. "I'm not a policymaker, so it's kind of hard to answer that question from our point of view," she said. Steven Altman then pointed to domestic policy as the lever for consumer protection, noting that international flows historically "adjust pretty fast" after shocks. Fair enough. Still, flows adjusting is not quite the same thing as prices coming down.In one-on-one interviews later that day, both Pearson and Lee engaged with the question more directly."People want the efficiency and economics of global trade," Pearson said. "That's why people don't like tariffs. It puts the end price up." He was blunt about who benefits when relief is offered. "When these exemptions are given, they probably won't get to the end consumer. They'll get to the company that's importing the little black dresses into the US, but they won't necessarily get to the teenager who bought them."That is a notable thing to hear from a CEO whose company moves those very parcels. The macro picture is resilient, yes. Trade barges through, as Pearson put it earlier that morning. But the micro picture, the person at the end of the supply chain, absorbs the friction in ways that 9 million data points do not capture. Lee came at it from a different angle. "From a consumer standpoint, I think there are two questions," he said. "Will the shipment safely reach my hand? And will the cost go up or come down?" The first, he argued, DHL can answer confidently, given its presence in 220 countries and territories. The second is tethered to forces no logistics company controls. "People are worried about energy costs," Lee said. "Because that is going to raise up prices everywhere. When price goes up, cost of living goes up."
On the ground in Vietnam
A panel session following the main conference brought together DHL's three Vietnam country heads, and the conversation turned from global abstraction to something more granular. Bernardo Bautista, country manager for DHL Express Vietnam, pointed to Vietnam's roughly 100-million-strong, young, and mobile population, its semiconductor ambitions, and the web of trade agreements, including RCEP and CPTPP, that position it as a serious player in international commerce.Bertrand Juvigny, heading DHL Supply Chain Vietnam, flagged medical devices as the sector he is watching most closely. Vietnam's medical device market was worth around US$650 million in 2017. Forecasts put it at US$2.4 billion by 2027. "Almost 4x where we feel we have space and room to capitalise on," he said. DHL Supply Chain is already servicing diagnostics machinery and MRI installations through its parts logistics operation, with service windows as tight as two hours from order to delivery.Laurence Cheung, managing director of DHL Global Forwarding Vietnam, spoke to the new energy opportunity. Vietnam still relies heavily on coal and hydropower, but the push towards solar and wind is accelerating. DHL Global Forwarding is handling the import of oversized power equipment for offshore and onshore sites, while also supporting the export of Vietnamese-manufactured solar components. The electric vehicle shift is visible too. Hanoi's streets are thick with electric taxis, a product of government policy that Cheung said is creating demand across the logistics chain.Vietnam's trade flows tell their own story. Inbound, China dominates. Outbound, the U.S. remains the largest destination. Intra-Asia Pacific lanes are strong and growing. The pattern fits with what Altman's data showed at the macro level: goods are not retreating behind borders. They are finding new routes, new partners, new corridors. New tributaries.
Too big to fail?
Lee was the most unequivocal of anyone I spoke to in Hanoi. "Is there some risk to globalisation? I'd say yes," he said. "But globalisation is too big to fail. That's my argument." He pointed to the report's own track record, 11 editions now, each time the data showing globalisation at or near record levels despite whatever crisis dominated the headlines that year. COVID. The Russia-Ukraine war. U.S.-China tariffs. "It just keeps on rising," Lee said. "I think globalisation is here to stay, and stay forever."Pearson, characteristically, reached for a more colourful frame in our interview. He compared the current moment to the global trade in bear pelts that ran through Leipzig 300 years ago and the Sheffield steel that was shipped worldwide in the 1800s. The products change, yes. But the impulse does not. "People want what they can't produce themselves, and they want it cheaper than if they tried," he said.And perhaps that is the real story from Hanoi. Not the record highs, nor the impressive data points, but the gap between them and the lived experience on the ground. Globalisation, by every measure DHL and NYU can construct, is holding firm. Trade is indeed flowing like water. But water, as the Mekong Delta can attest, does not flow evenly. It pools in some places and takes longer to reach others.That being said, Vietnam offers a compelling answer to the sceptics. A country that was picking fruit and potatoes in 1986, as Pearson put it, now hosts semiconductor assembly lines and exports solar components. A young workforce, increasingly educated and English-proficient, is entering an industry that Lee said has moved from "a side check" to a boardroom priority. None of that happened overnight. And none of it would have happened without the kind of open trade that the Connectedness Report documents.The benefits of globalization do arrive. They show up in GDP per capita figures that climb tenfold over four decades. In electric taxis filling the streets of a city barely on the logistics map a generation ago. They arrive, though on a timeline that does not always match the urgency of the moment. But then, what is the alternative?The Connectedness Report proves that the world is not pulling apart. What Vietnam proves is something harder to pin down in a spreadsheet: that staying connected, however messy the process, still pays off.
Value Chain Asia attended the DHL Global Connectedness Report 2026 launch in Hanoi, Vietnam on March 10, 2026, at the invitation of DHL Group.