U.S. tariffs on Vietnam have become a moving target, and few people feel it more keenly than Yap Kwong Weng. “U.S. tariffs have changed three times this year,” the Vietnam SuperPort chief executive tells Fortune.

The year opened with Vietnamese goods facing a 20% tariff—the rate Washington and Hanoi agreed to as part of an interim trade framework concluded in October 2025. In February, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the reciprocal tariffs that President Donald Trump had imposed in April 2025, finding them unlawful; Trump responded by imposing a global 10% tariff on all imports. Since July, most Vietnamese goods have carried a 12.5% import duty, following a U.S. Section 301 investigation into forced labor enforcement—invoking a trade-law tool that empowers the U.S. Trade Representative to investigate unfair foreign practices and impose duties in response.

The rules are likely to shift again, whether through ongoing trade negotiations between the U.S. and Vietnam or further American probes into industrial overcapacity and intellectual property protections.

“Companies now have stopped looking at stability,” Yap says. “Now they are planning for uncertainty.”

Yap leads Vietnam SuperPort, a joint venture between Singapore's YCH Group, a family-owned logistics company, and T&T Group, a Vietnamese conglomerate. The 83-hectare hub, based in Phu Tho province north of Hanoi, sits on the corridors that link Vietnam's electronics manufacturing belt to the Chinese border, where most of its components originate. The concept is to merge road, rail, air, and sea transit into a single service, so an exporter can book one predictable route rather than juggle four different modes.

The SuperPort's air cargo terminal is already operational, and Yap says monthly revenue has increased fivefold since July. Customers include FedEx, major global forwarders, and top electronics and AI hardware companies.

His guiding principle, he says, has been to be “the most trusted first.” That instinct is now being tested on a national scale. The roughly $300 million hub is a wager that Vietnam can graduate from routine final assembly to a genuine logistics and value-added base. Its air cargo terminal handles consumer electronics, AI server racks, and networking gear—freight valuable enough to fly and sensitive enough to require TAPA security certification, the supply-chain security standard set by the Transported Asset Protection Association for high-value goods.

The strategy faces two tests. The first is Washington: whether goods stamped “made in Vietnam” keep flowing as tariffs whipsaw and U.S. investigations multiply. (The U.S. buys roughly a third of all Vietnamese exports.) The second is Hanoi: whether the country can build the infrastructure, energy capacity, and skills needed to sustain its pace of growth.

A 'super normal' economy

Vietnam's economy grew 9.95% in the third quarter of 2026, keeping the country within reach of Hanoi's 10% growth target for the year. Despite continued trade uncertainty and disruption from the Iran war, it is growing faster than last year's 8% GDP expansion. Yap calls it a “super normal” economy: frictions that might be mere annoyances in a slower economy become genuine barriers to growth in one moving this quickly.

Exports remain the engine. The country shipped almost $500 billion worth of goods in the first ten months of the year. Much of that trade is with the U.S., Vietnam's most important export partner; the country's trade surplus with the U.S. stands at $140 billion for the year so far.

Vietnam has settled comfortably into “China plus one” supply chains, in which manufacturing—particularly final assembly—moves to third countries to capture lower costs and, potentially, lower tariffs. Chinese-made components cross the border into Vietnam, where factories owned by Samsung, Foxconn, and others assemble the pieces; finished products then ship to the U.S., Europe, and markets across Asia.

Those cross-border supply chains carry a cost. Logistics expenses currently run between 16% and 20% of Vietnam's GDP, and Hanoi hopes to push that below 12% by 2030. Yap says the burden stems from administration, customs, and transport fees, and is borne either by exporters or passed on to consumers. In his view, “smarter infrastructure” is the only way to bring those costs down.

Both China and Vietnam are spending billions to better integrate their economies. Vietnam is investing $11 billion in the Lao Cai–Hanoi–Haiphong rail line, a modern standard-gauge route—built to the 1,435-millimeter track width China's network uses, rather than the metre gauge of Vietnam's legacy lines—designed to connect China's rail network at the northern border directly to Haiphong's deep-water port, cutting the cost and time of moving Chinese components and Vietnamese exports between the border and the sea. The country is also replacing Ho Chi Minh City's stretched Tan Son Nhat airport with the new Long Thanh airport, which is expected to shift more cargo capacity to southern Vietnam.

China, for its part, opened the 134-kilometer Pinglu Canal in September, giving the country's industrial southwest its first direct water route to the sea—and pointing that route south toward Vietnam rather than east toward Guangzhou. Freight from Guangxi once had to travel hundreds of kilometers down the Xijiang River to the Pearl River Delta; ships of up to 5,000 tonnes can now sail straight into the Gulf of Tonkin, trimming more than 560 kilometers from the trip and, by Beijing's estimates, as much as 30% off logistics costs.

Energy is another bottleneck. Some provinces have seen power shutdowns despite heavy investment in new generation, including renewables. Money is a related constraint: some estimates put Vietnam's financing gap as large as $200 billion, while others suggest the power sector alone will need $142 billion by 2030. “There is a bankability problem right now,” Yap says—industry shorthand for infrastructure that cannot secure financing on terms lenders accept.

Vietnam's role in these supply chains is raising eyebrows in Washington, where some elements of the Trump administration see a pathway for Chinese companies to evade U.S. tariffs. The argument: by performing minimal value-added activity in Vietnam, Chinese goods acquire a “made in Vietnam” label and dodge the steeper duties placed on Chinese-made products. Under last year's interim trade agreement between the U.S. and Vietnam, Hanoi agreed to a 40% tariff on goods deemed to have been transshipped from China, though details on what that meant—or how it would be investigated—were not provided.

Yap thinks about value-added too, but from a Vietnam-based perspective. “What is important is how the goods are being handled securely, the quality, and where the value goes,” he says. “Does the value stay onshore? Is it where Vietnamese managers and companies grow, or the value goes offshore?”

Vietnam is pushing for high-income status by 2045. In Yap's view, that shift means moving from assembly alone to real innovation, investing in skills across engineering, automation, semiconductor packaging, and logistics. Hanoi wants the new technology sector to contribute 6% of GDP by 2030, driven by domestic players such as Viettel and FPT.

'Frontier optimism is not a strategy'

Yap's biography is unconventional. He spent more than a decade in Singapore's armed forces, including U.S. Navy SEAL training, finished his first degree at age 30, and later held business leadership roles in Southeast Asian emerging markets along with consulting positions at KPMG and EY-Parthenon in Singapore.

One of those markets was Myanmar, which he describes as once looking a lot like Vietnam—hotels full of American, Korean, and Thai executives convinced they had found the next high-growth market. That confidence was upended by the 2021 military coup, which set Myanmar's putative economic opening back by a generation.

That experience now shapes how he views Vietnam. “Infrastructure depends on confidence from investors,” he says. “I remain very optimistic about Vietnam. But I'm never complacent about it.” “Frontier optimism is not a strategy,” he adds.

SuperPort is planning for uncertainty, not against it. Yap says customers now ask him three questions: “Who controls the data? Who verifies the origin? And what are the routes that can be rerouted so that one storage location can go to another storage location?”

His answer is a network. SuperPort intends to build four ports across Southeast Asia by 2030. Cambodia SuperPort, a 130-hectare multimodal complex in Kampong Speu near Phnom Penh, is designed to connect back into Vietnam through a planned hub in Tay Ninh province, on the Cambodian border.

Tariffs could change a fourth—or even a fifth—time this year. Vietnam could be hit with new Section 301 tariffs, or Washington and Hanoi could sign a new trade deal that brings overall tariff levels down again. Through it all, Yap keeps his eye on the one thing tariffs cannot change: what is happening on the ground. “For now, I think Vietnam has the momentum,” he says.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.