Most large firms remain under state ownership, but the role and number of private enterprises has steadily increased. Most enterprises produce consumer goods for the domestic market, although a growing number manufacture goods for export, notably textiles and processed foods. Steel production has increased dramatically since the end of the war, and the manufacture of cement, chemical fertilizer, and textile and paper goods is on the upswing. Foreign firms play a growing but still limited role in the industrial sector.

Most mining activities take place in the northern provinces of the country, where anthracite coal, phosphate rock, gypsum, tin, zinc, iron, antimony, and chromite are extracted. Coal and apatite are mined extensively. The total coal production in 2003 was 16 million metric tons.

In recent years, large petroleum and natural gas deposits have been discovered along the continental shelf in the South China Sea. With assistance from the Soviet Union, Vietnam began extracting oil from its first oil field in the mid-1980s. Additional oil fields have since become productive. In the late 1990s petroleum accounted for nearly one-third of Vietnam’s export revenues. Further development may be hindered, however, by disputes with China and other neighboring nations over the ownership of offshore deposits in the area. Encarta