Where the parcels sleep: Inside DHL’s Vietnam infrastructure bet

The DHL Supply Chain facility sits about 30 kilometres from Noi Bai airport, inside a Mapletree industrial estate where container trucks were already lined up along the loading bays when the media group arrived. It is a multi-user facility, spanning 28,000 square metres across two blocks.The site serves several customers: L'Oréal labelling was visible from the moment we walked in, and Samsung, Schneider Electric, Midea, Wipro, Oatside and Onto also operate out of the same building.Bertrand Juvigny, who took over as country managing director for DHL Supply Chain Vietnam in March 2025, presented to the group from inside the warehouse itself. Chairs and a TV screen had been set up near the racking and the shuttered dock doors. "I'm very happy I'm in Vietnam," Juvigny told the room, before walking through DHL Supply Chain's national footprint: 16 warehouses, four dedicated transport hubs, more than 1,500 vehicles, and over 2,500 daily consignments passing through its control tower.Juvigny's presentation outlined the distinction between the multi-user model we were standing inside, where resources are shared (labour, equipment, floor space) for lower costs and faster deployment, and the dedicated-site model DHL runs elsewhere in the country, built to a single customer's specifications with custom layouts, compliance standards, and higher automation. Dedicated sites cost more and take longer to stand up. But for high-volume, specialised work, they are the better fit.A separate staging area held thousands of palletised consumer goods stacked several metres high on the open floor, awaiting cross-dock dispatch.The dedicated site in Hung Yen province, about 60 kilometres south, is the largest in the network at 51,100 square metres across three blocks. And DHL is not done. Juvigny showed slides of an upcoming campus, also in Hung Yen, spanning 82,000 square metres once complete, planned for four blocks of Grade A single-storey warehousing along the Northern Vietnam Economic Corridor. DHL has already received the investment registration certificate from the Hung Yen Party Chairman. "There are many sites, some bigger than this, here in the north or in the south," Juvigny said, "but we unfortunately can't bring you all without an agreement from the customers."That is still a lot of concrete for a company that arrived in Vietnam when the country was in the early years of Doi Moi.The growth pillars Juvigny outlined were familiar from the day before: consumer goods, automotive, technology, life sciences, retail. FMCG remains the backbone of DHL Supply Chain's Vietnam business, and Juvigny was direct about the difficulty. "Even for those who understand logistics, they know that FMCG is extremely hard," he said. Margins are thin, volumes are massive, and service-level expectations are unforgiving. DHL's employee opinion survey returned a 97% satisfaction rate in Vietnam, the highest in Asia Pacific, and the operation ranked fourth among Best Workplaces in the country for 2025. For a warehousing operation running on shift work and agency labour, those numbers are worth pausing on.The transition from paper to digital came up more than once. Vietnam's logistics sector, for all its growth, still relies on physical documentation far more heavily than comparable markets. "Vietnam remains a little bit paper-based, far more so than other markets," Juvigny said. DHL is rolling out connected control tower technology and digitising the visibility chain, but Juvigny was candid about the pace. "Converting from paper to digital is not a simple thing. If it's not good at the beginning, it's not going to be good at the end." The data has to be cleansed and standardised first. That work is ongoing.He described Vietnam as "an extremely dynamic market" with constant shifts requiring the company to adapt. The semiconductor sector was flagged as a vertical growing at pace, one DHL sees as increasingly central to its Vietnam offering.

The afternoon brought a different kind of facility. The DHL Express gateway at Noi Bai handles inbound and outbound international shipments, the parcels and documents that are the bread and butter of DHL's express division. The Hanoi gateway is one of two in Vietnam, the other being in Ho Chi Minh City. It represents a EUR 11.7 million investment, is twice the size of the previous facility, and has four times its predecessor's peak handling capacity.The numbers came fast during a briefing before the floor tour. A total site area of 4,500 square metres. Warehouse space of 3,700 square metres. Some 640 metres of conveyor belt. Five loading and unloading docks. An average daily volume of 45,000 kilograms moving inbound and outbound. And 173 CCTV cameras watching all of it.Hanoi is served by three flight routes. One from Hong Kong via Bangkok. A second connecting Charles de Gaulle to Bahrain to Hanoi to Hong Kong and back. A third, added in August, linking Delhi to Hanoi to Hong Kong to Bahrain. Five flights per day touch down in Vietnam, and 8 out of 10 DHL Express facilities in the country hold TAPA certification, the security standard governing how high-value freight is stored and moved.On the warehouse floor, a customs clearance team of around 50 agents and four supervisors processed the day's shipments in real time. Shipments split into two categories: conveyable items, under 30 kilograms and less than a metre in any dimension, riding the conveyor belts, and non-conveyable items following a manual route. Customs clearance follows a similar logic: documents clear fast, low-value shipments pass through informal channels, and everything above the de minimis threshold enters formal declaration.Parcels moved along the belts, cleared customs paperwork stacked up behind the glass in the customs-controlled area, and customers waited at the collection point for their own shipments. The tour guide, one of the facility's operations leads, walked the group through each zone with quiet authority.The sustainability angle was visible on the roof, even if we did not climb up there. The Hanoi gateway has 275 solar panels installed, generating an estimated 120 kWh per hour and cutting roughly 70 tonnes of carbon emissions annually. ‘Tis a modest contribution for an aviation-heavy business. But it is measurable.

DHL Express Vietnam employs more than 700 people. DHL Supply Chain Vietnam runs 16 warehouses. Across the entire DHL Group, Vietnam hosts close to 60 facilities and more than 2,000 employees, with over 30 dedicated flights moving goods in and out of the country every day. The group has been here for 38 years.None of those figures featured in the Global Connectedness Report. The report deals in macro flows: trade percentages, capital movements, information exchange, people crossing borders. It does not concern itself with the square metreage of a warehouse in Bac Ninh.But the two are connected in ways the report cannot capture. A globalisation level of 25% is an abstraction. The Bac Ninh warehouse, with L'Oréal lipstick on one side and Samsung parts on the other, is the physical form of that abstraction. Vietnam is one of DHL's GT20 countries, an internal designation for 20 markets the company expects to outpace the rest over the next five years. Semiconductors are pulling in FDI at pace, with Vietnam's market projected to reach US$31 billion by 2027. Medical devices are forecast to hit US$2.4 billion by the same year. Under the government's revised energy plan, renewable energy is expected to account for 25 to 30% of total primary energy supply by 2030. DHL is already moving equipment for solar and wind installations.And then there is the land. The investment registration for 82,000 square metres of new warehousing in Hung Yen is the kind of commitment that does not hedge. Juvigny's growth strategy rested on four pillars: diversifying the customer portfolio, expanding solutions, accelerating transport capabilities, and securing land in the north. The fourth is the one that writes cheques. It is the one that says this market is no longer a bet. Or rather, that it is a bet already placed.The previous day, John Pearson, CEO of DHL Express, told journalists that Vietnam's GDP per capita climbed from roughly US$400 in 1986 to around US$4,000 today. DHL has been present for most of that climb. The warehouses and gateways visited on March 11 are where that presence becomes concrete, in racking systems and conveyor belts and customs clearance desks.When Value Chain Asia attended DHL's Geographic Tailwinds Gulf Tour in Dubai eight months earlier, the standout moment from the Supply Chain division was a brand-new EV battery recycling facility with no customers yet. Infrastructure built ahead of demand, a statement of intent rather than capacity. Vietnam is a different story. The Bac Ninh warehouse is full. The Hung Yen site is operational. The Hanoi Express gateway processes 45,000 kilograms of shipments a day. Intent has been converted into activity. And the activity is growing.Half-full and half-empty, then. Just like that warehouse in Bac Ninh. DHL's infrastructure there is the proof that Vietnam is not waiting to become a logistics market, because it already is one.The empty racking is just room for whatever comes next.Value Chain Asia attended the DHL Global Connectedness Report 2026 launch and facility tours in Hanoi, Vietnam on March 10–11, 2026, at the invitation of DHL Group.