The true landed cost of importing from Vietnam

Two factories quote the same product: $4.20 a unit FOB Ho Chi Minh City, or $4.05 EXW from a plant three hours inland. The second looks cheaper and often is not — EXW leaves inland trucking, export clearance and port handling on your side of the ledger. The only number that compares suppliers honestly is landed cost: the full cost of getting sellable goods into your own warehouse.

This guide is for buyers in Europe and the Americas costing their first Vietnam orders. By the end you can build a landed-cost sheet line by line, read trade terms for what they shift onto you, and — if you import into the EU — use the EVFTA to take your duty line to zero.

Why unit price comparisons mislead

A unit price tells you what the factory charges under specific trade terms at a specific point in the chain. It says nothing about ocean freight, duty, brokerage, inspection or the units that arrive defective — lines that vary so much between suppliers, routes and terms that they regularly reverse the ranking of two quotes.

The trap is structural. The factory controls the number you see first, and every cost pushed outside the quote makes that number look better. Your job is to rebuild each offer into the same landed-cost format before comparing anything.

Every component of landed cost

Build the sheet with one row per cost line. For a typical ocean shipment out of Vietnam, these seven lines cover everything that ends up in your true unit cost.

Two details buyers miss. First, the duty base differs: the EU charges duty on a CIF-style customs value — goods plus freight and insurance to the border — while the US uses the FOB value and excludes international freight. Second, transit ties up cash: reckon on roughly 30–40 days port-to-port to Northern Europe, two to four weeks to the US West Coast and around five to the East Coast, before trucking and clearance. A deposit paid at order can sit in unsellable goods for months.

Incoterms in practice: FOB, CIF and DDP

Incoterms are the standard trade terms that define where the seller's costs and risks stop and yours begin. Three dominate Vietnam quotes:

• FOB (free on board) — the supplier delivers the goods loaded on the vessel at a named Vietnamese port; you book and pay freight, insurance and every cost after. The cleanest basis for comparing suppliers.
• CIF (cost, insurance and freight) — the supplier also pays freight and minimum insurance to your destination port, but risk still passes at loading in Vietnam, and the freight is booked through their forwarder at a margin you cannot see.
• DDP (delivered duty paid) — the supplier handles everything including import clearance and duty. One tidy number, and the least transparent quote you can receive.

Treat DDP with suspicion rather than gratitude. It buries duty and freight margin in one figure, can complicate import VAT recovery because you may not be the importer of record, and leaves you exposed if the seller's broker undervalues the goods. First-time importers do better buying FOB with their own forwarder — every later line stays visible and under your control.

The EVFTA: how EU buyers get duty to zero

The EVFTA, the EU-Vietnam free trade agreement in force since August 2020, is why a Vietnam landed-cost sheet can win even at a higher unit price. The EU removed duties on most tariff lines the day the agreement started, and roughly 99% reach zero within seven years — a schedule that completes in August 2027. Look up your HS code's standard and preferential rate on the European Commission's Access2Markets database before you negotiate.

Proof of origin

Preference is claimed, not automatic. For consignments above €6,000, your supplier applies for a EUR.1 movement certificate issued via Vietnam's Ministry of Industry and Trade; smaller consignments can travel on an origin declaration on the invoice. No valid proof at clearance means paying the standard rate — so name the EUR.1 as a deliverable in your purchase order, and confirm current procedures with your customs broker.

Rules of origin

Zero duty applies only to goods that genuinely originate in Vietnam under the agreement's rules of origin: product-specific rules cap third-country input and define which processing must happen in Vietnam. Simple assembly or repacking of Chinese components does not qualify, and textiles carry notably strict requirements. Ask early where a supplier's inputs come from — one who cannot answer is telling you something.

Importing to the US: a moving target

US tariff treatment of Vietnamese goods has changed repeatedly since 2025. A July 2025 agreement set a 20% tariff on Vietnamese-origin goods, with 40% for goods transshipped through Vietnam. In February 2026 the US Supreme Court struck down the legal basis for those tariffs; the administration answered with a temporary surcharge under a different statute, which a trade court invalidated in May 2026. As of mid-2026, appeals and replacement measures are still in motion, and separate sectoral duties — steel and aluminum among them — apply on top.

The durable lesson is not any single rate. Treat US duty as a variable: confirm the current rate for your HS code with a licensed customs broker at order time, add tariff-change clauses to longer agreements, and never fix a resale price on an assumption about rates at arrival.

CBAM: the carbon line for steel and aluminum

EU importers of iron and steel, aluminum, cement, fertilizers, hydrogen and electricity carry one more line since 1 January 2026, when the definitive regime of CBAM — the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism — began. Import more than 50 tonnes of covered goods a year and you must register as an authorized CBAM declarant, report the emissions embedded in your imports and buy CBAM certificates priced off the EU carbon market; the first declaration and surrender fall due by September 2027. The European Commission's CBAM pages hold the current rules.

For most consumer goods this line is zero. For steel it can be material — the specifics are in our guide to sourcing steel from Vietnam.

A worked example

The numbers below are illustrative — round figures chosen for easy arithmetic, not market quotes. Say you order 1,000 units at $10.00 FOB Ho Chi Minh City, shipping one container to Rotterdam:

1. FOB value: 1,000 × $10.00 = $10,000.
2. Ocean freight plus insurance to Rotterdam: $2,000, making the CIF value $12,000.
3. Import duty with a valid EUR.1 under the EVFTA: $0. Without proof of origin, an example 5% standard rate on CIF would add $600.
4. Brokerage, port charges and delivery to your warehouse: $700.
5. Pre-shipment inspection: $300.
6. Landed cost: $13,000 — $13.00 per unit, 30% above quote. Import VAT applies on top but comes back through your VAT return.

Run the same sheet for every competing quote — same columns, same destination — and the ranking is often not the one unit prices suggested. Here the missing EUR.1 alone would swing the order by $600, a 6% move on the factory price, for one document.

Common mistakes and your next steps

The expensive mistakes are the same short list every year:

• Comparing an EXW quote against an FOB quote as if they were the same number.
• Accepting DDP to avoid paperwork, then discovering at the first audit what duty and VAT treatment sat inside it.
• Assuming EVFTA zero duty applies automatically — no proof of origin, no preference.
• Costing freight at last year's rate instead of getting dated quotes; rates out of Vietnam move with season and capacity.
• Skipping the pre-shipment inspection on a five-figure order to save a few hundred dollars — our guide to working with a Vietnam sourcing agent covers how inspections fit a sourcing setup.
• Carrying no reserve for defects, rework or currency movement, so the first claim eats the margin.

Your next steps: request every quote FOB with the HS code stated, look up the duty and preferential rate before negotiating, get dated freight quotes, and make the EUR.1 a contractual deliverable. If you would rather see the whole number from the start, Enbeko's sourcing and outsourcing service quotes projects as landed-cost views, with QC and logistics managed on the Vietnam side.