President Tran Dai Quang (Photo: VNA)

He said defense and security have been the effective strategic areas of cooperation. India has actively supported Vietnam in training, capacity building, defense technology transfer, and defense credit. India continued to be among Vietnam’s top ten largest trading partners as the bilateral trade turnover has increased 16% per annum on average in the past decade. A large number of major Indian firms have established and expanded their footprints in Vietnam.
India has given priority to Vietnam in development cooperation and education and training, and paid attention to promoting the bilateral cooperation in science and technology, information and communication, energy, oil and gas, agriculture and tourism. President Quang said that economic, investment and trade cooperation is one of the areas enjoying very high growth recently, especially since the two countries established the Strategic Partnership in 2007 and upgraded it to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2016. Vietnam encourages more investments from India so that the latter will become one of the top investors into Vietnam and the target of 15 billion USD in bilateral trade by 2020 can be realized. Moreover, both sides need to establish business-to-business and business-to-government dialogue mechanisms, and provide forums for sharing interests, strategies and visions for development cooperation. Both countries’ businesses also need to play a more active role in promoting cooperation.

Apart from the bilateral frameworks, both countries have also forged close collaboration and effective mutual support at multilateral fora, especially at the United Nations. Vietnam welcomes India's efforts in and strong commitments to its "Act East" policy as well as to enhancing the connectivity and development cooperation with ASEAN. As the coordinator of ASEAN-India relations for 2015-2018, Vietnam has worked closely with India to drive the India-ASEAN cooperation further forward.