Hanoi (VNA) – Although financial leasing offers significant advantages for private healthcare providers, outstanding financial leases for medical equipment currently stand at only around 1 trillion VND (38.45 million USD), highlighting the need to remove bottlenecks and introduce tailored policies to expand this financing channel.
Financial leasing can provide medium- and long-term financing, cover up to 100% of equipment costs and use revenue generated from equipment operations to service lease payments.
There is considerable room to expand this financing source as private healthcare faces growing investment needs, while Resolution No. 72-NQ/TW on breakthrough solutions to strengthen the protection, care and improvement of people’s health has opened new development space for the private healthcare sector.
Dr Nguyen Khanh Phuong, Director of the Health Strategy and Policy Institute, said that as of June 2026, Vietnam had around 450 private hospitals and more than 50,000 clinics, yet private-sector hospital beds accounted for only about 6% of the national total.
According to Phuong, new policies are gradually establishing a clearer position, role and development direction for private healthcare. At the same time, rapid population ageing, growing healthcare demand and rising purchasing power are creating greater room for private providers to expand their scale and service capacity, driving greater investment in facilities, technology and medical equipment.
Some research organisations forecast that Vietnam’s medical equipment market could reach 2.5–4 billion USD annually in the coming period and remain among the fastest-growing markets in the Asia-Pacific region.
Financial leasing is essentially a medium- and long-term financing method under which a leasing company purchases equipment at a hospital’s request and leases it for most of the asset’s useful life. The ability of such equipment to generate steady revenue over many years provides the basis for financial leasing to become a financing option, easing the pressure of upfront investment.
Revenue generated by the equipment itself can service lease obligations, while hospitals do not need to mobilise large amounts of capital at the outset. This is the essence of asset-based financing backed by cash-generating assets, a model widely used in Germany, Japan and the Republic of Korea for high-tech medical equipment.
Bottlenecks remain
Despite the substantial potential, financial leasing for medical equipment remains relatively small. Data from the Vietnam Financial Leasing Association (VILEA) shows that outstanding financial leases in this sector stand at around 1 trillion VND, equivalent to approximately 2.3% of Vietnam’s medical equipment market, valued at around 1.7 billion USD a year.
To tap this potential, VILEA General Secretary Pham Xuan Hoe pointed to several bottlenecks that need to be removed. He said many private healthcare facilities currently face difficulties in accessing land, completing investment procedures, determining healthcare service prices, receiving health insurance reimbursements, and navigating socialisation mechanisms, as well as bidding and procurement procedures for equipment.
These constraints directly affect cash flows and businesses’ access to financing, thereby limiting the expansion of financial leasing in the sector.
Another barrier is the preference for asset ownership. According to Hoe, many business owners and clinic operators still want machinery and equipment to be owned and registered in their own names. The defining feature of financial leasing, however, is that businesses can use assets to generate cash flow without necessarily having to own them from the outset.
The VILEA also believes that specific mechanisms are needed to further promote the role of financial leasing in the economy, particularly in the private healthcare sector./.
VNA
