☕ Afternoon briefing on April 8

Hanoi, (VNA) - The following is a brief review of the day’s events as reported by the Vietnam News Agency.

– National Assembly (NA) Chairman Vuong Dinh Hue had a meeting with General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on April 8 as part of his ongoing official visit to China.

Xi was the first Chinese leader to host the Vietnamese NA leader in the visit, showing the importance that China attaches to bilateral relations as well as to the Vietnamese delegation’s visit.Read full text 

– Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh hosted a reception in Hanoi on April 8 for Sergey Ivanovich Kudryashov, General Director of Russia’s Zarubezhneft JSC, who is on a working visit to Vietnam to seek cooperation opportunities in oil and gas and energy.

Kudryashov told the host that the over-40-year cooperation between Zarubezhneft and the Vietnam Oil and Gas Group (Petrovietnam) through the Vietsovpetro and Rusvietpetro joint ventures has achieved successes in geological exploration, and oil and gas exploitation, thus creating jobs and contributing to each country's budget.Read full text

– Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh has signed to issue an official dispatch requesting ministries, sectors and localities to exert efforts to ensure information security, given recent increases in cyberattacks, especially the presence of ransomware.

In the document, the Government leader stressed that as many information systems providing online services to serve people and businesses with a large scale and big impact on the society, they need to receive due attention to be able to ensure information security at the highest level.Read full text

– Vietnam attaches importance to and wants to further strengthen Vietnam-US relations, implement high-level agreements between the two sides, and promote friendship and cooperation with leftist organisations and movements in the US, a Vietnamese Party official has said.

Vice Chairman of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) Central Committee's Commission for External Relations Ngo Le Van made the statement at meetings and working sessions with representatives of left-wing organisations and movements of the US, including the Communist Party USA, as part of the commission delegation's working visit to the US on April 4  and 5.Read full text

– The European Chamber of Commerce Vietnam (EuroCham) on April 8 released the Business Confidence Index (BCI) for the first quarter of 2024, saying that the index reached 52.8 points - the highest level since 2022.

The index shows that Vietnam's economic growth boosts the optimism of European businesses. It is also evidence of increased strong confidence in the Vietnamese economy among European businesses operating in the Southeast Asian country.Read full text

- Vietnam has so far drawn nearly 500 billion USD in registered FDI capital after nearly four decades of opening up its economy, with investment quality improvement considered a key task for a new breakthrough phase ahead, the Ha Noi Moi newspaper assessed in its recent article.

According to the General Statistics Office, the total FDI in the first quarter of 2024 neared 6.17 billion USD, up 13.4% year-on-year. The first three months also saw 4.63 billion USD worth of FDI disbursed, an annual rise of 7.1% and the highest for the quarter over the past five years.Read full text

– The Ministry of National Defence held a ceremony in Hanoi on April 8 to hand over the President's and the Defence Minister’s decisions to send three officers to the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions in the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Abyei.

The officers were deployed to replace their predecessors at the missions. Among them, one will serve as a military observer at the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA), another as a military observer at the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), and the only female as a logistics staff officer at the United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA).Read full text/.