APM Terminals, the ports arm of Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk, and Vietnam’s Hateco Group have signed a non-binding agreement to study the development and operation of railway freight terminals in northern Vietnam, the Vietnamese government said on Tuesday. Bloomberg, which first sized the plan, reported the two companies intend a railway container terminal network costing about 3.5 billion dollars.
The distinction matters. What exists today is a study agreement, not a construction commitment, a concession award or a financing. The 3.5 billion dollars is the reported scale of the network under study, not capital committed, and no timetable, site list or funding structure has been published.
The partnership behind it is already substantial. Hateco and APM Terminals built and opened the Haiphong international container terminal in April 2026 and are developing the Lien Chieu container port at Da Nang, a project of about 1.7 billion dollars with capacity planned at 5.7 million TEU a year and a 50 year concession. Rail terminals in the north would connect those coastal assets to the manufacturing provinces behind Haiphong, where electronics and machinery exporters currently truck containers to port.
For Maersk, the logic is the post alliance strategy in physical form: since the 2M partnership with MSC ended, the group has been buying control of the landside nodes its ships serve. For Vietnam, a rail served terminal network in the north is the missing layer between its deep water ports and its factories, and the signing during a state visit puts the project inside a government to government framework rather than a purely commercial one.