On June 17, 2020, the 14th National Assembly promulgated the Law on Investment No. 61/2020/QH14. This Law takes effect from January 1st, 2021. Accordingly, the Investment Law 2020 has made more comprehensive and complete changes than the shortcomings of the 2014 Investment Law. One of the outstanding contents is the regulation on abolishing and supplementing some conditional business lines. Specifically as follows:

First, to abolish 16 conditional business lines. The current list of conditional business sectors and trades is subject to the provisions of the Law amending and supplementing Article 6 and Appendix 4 on the List of sectors and trades subject to conditional business investment in the Investment Law 2014, including 243 industries and trades. However, because there are a number of conditional business lines that are deemed unnecessary and obstruct the market entry process of individuals and organizations, the Investment Law 2020 has reduced the number of industries and occupations conditional business to 227 occupations.

Secondly, adding 08 conditional business lines, including: 

• Processing, trading, transporting, advertising, displaying and storing specimens of plants and animals in the Appendixes of the CITES Convention and the list of endangered, precious and rare forest plants, animals and aquatic animals;
• Trading in clean water (domestic water);
• Business architecture services;
• Registry of fishing ships;
• Training and retraining for fishing ship crew members;
• Data center service business;
• Providing electronic identification and authentication services;  Import press release service business.

Thirdly, the Investment Law 2020 also amends a number of regulations on business lines such as: Insurance brokers into “insurance, auxiliary” insurance brokers;  Providing “. Vn” domain name registration and maintenance services into domain name registration and maintenance services;  Business shipping, shipping agency services into shipping business;… and some detailed modification in other industries.