Tiếng Việt
中文 (中国)
Tan Thuan EPZ here means the export-processing zone in Tan Thuan Dong Ward, District 7, Ho Chi Minh City — not Hiep Phuoc Industrial Park in Nha Be (post 1068), not Tan Thuan Port (a separate nearby port facility), and not Tan Thuan Dong Ward itself (the ward is larger than the zone).
What Tan Thuan EPZ is
Tan Thuan Export Processing Zone, Vietnam’s first export-processing zone, was established on 25 November 1991 under Decision No. 394/CT of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers. The export-processing-zone regulations that preceded it were issued under Decree No. 322/HĐBT on 18 October 1991. The developer and operator is Tan Thuan Corporation (TTC), a joint venture between Tan Thuan Industrial Promotion Company (IPC, Vietnam) and Central Trading & Development Corporation (CT&D, Taiwan). The zone operates under the framework of the Ho Chi Minh City Export Processing and Industrial Zones Authority (HEPZA). In September 2026 TTC appointed Savills Vietnam as Property Manager; Savills is the appointed manager, not the developer or owner of the zone.
The zone covers 300 hectares on a Saigon River peninsula in Tan Thuan Dong Ward, District 7, adjacent to Phu My Hung. Savills (September 2026) describes the zone as home to 250 companies from 22 countries. For an investor or tenant, the legal and operating facts matter before any floor decision: this is an export-processing zone, not an ordinary industrial park, with a named operator, a management-authority framework, and a lease horizon that frames how long a floor investment can reasonably be expected to serve. The floor question here is not a new plant on empty land; it is floors inside operating export factories, warehouses, yards and offices, beside a nearby port area.
Four functional areas, four different floor questions
According to the operator, the zone comprises four functional areas: the Export Processing Zone, the Industrial Zone, the Commercial Zone and the E-Office Park, bringing manufacturing, warehousing, office and commercial activities together in one location. Each area sets a different floor requirement, and no single system should be applied across the whole zone without a survey and the tenant’s own standard for that area.
Export-processing factory floors need a flat surface that is easy to clean to the level the tenant requires, because production and packing feed export orders directly. The Industrial Zone contains factories with different loads and vehicles, so the system must be chosen factory by factory rather than by the zone’s name. The Commercial Zone is about floors that carry foot traffic and keep their appearance under continuous use; it is not a separate shopping project. The E-Office Park needs office floors with lighter loads, where appearance and durability under daily use matter more than resistance to heavy forklift traffic.
In general terms only, the zone’s infrastructure is described as roads, power, water supply, environmental monitoring, industrial waste treatment and a bonded warehouse, together with worker facilities. This article lists that infrastructure in general terms only and gives no capacity, throughput or specification figure for it, because no such figure is verified for this article. The zone’s historic industry mix was labour-intensive; the operator describes a shift from labour-intensive production toward higher-value activities, including precision mechanics, electrical and electronics, and software. That shift matters for floors: a factory with higher cleanliness and flatness requirements does not use the same selection criteria as a factory that mainly needs load resistance and basic ease of cleaning.
Port-adjacent warehouse, yard and loading floors
What distinguishes Tan Thuan from a purely inland export-processing zone is its river and port adjacency: the zone sits on the Saigon River, near Tan Thuan Port, and a bonded warehouse forms part of its general infrastructure. Its floor map therefore needs a separate warehouse, yard and loading layer, in addition to factory floors: export warehouses, marshalling yards, forklift lanes and loading areas where vehicles and goods move continuously and surfaces take more wear and impact than office or light-production floors.
Under the 2006 detailed plan (scale 1/2000, approved by the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee), the allocations within the 300-hectare study area were 196.32 hectares for export-processing construction, 8.13 hectares for industrial construction, 9.29 hectares for warehouse, yard and barge-port construction, and 15.4 hectares for an administration and service centre. These are 2006 planning figures, not current land use and not current floor area, and the four listed allocations do not cover the whole study area — the remainder belongs to other planning items not listed in the source excerpt. The 9.29-hectare warehouse, yard and barge-port allocation in the 2006 plan shows that the warehouse and yard function was part of the zone’s original planning, not a later addition.
For this layer, three practical requirements stand out. First, forklift lanes must be separated from pedestrian walkways by clear lane marking, so vehicles and people do not share an undifferentiated route. Second, trafficked surfaces need wear resistance, while walkways need slip resistance. Third, loading areas need their own survey of substrate condition and damage from trucks and forklifts, rather than the same system as an enclosed warehouse or an outdoor yard. The distinction between factory and warehouse floors is set out in Epoxy for Factories vs Logistics Warehouses, and the forklift and heavy-truck floor frame is covered in Epoxy Flooring for Forklift and Heavy Truck Floors.
Refurbishment in a zone operating for more than 30 years
Tan Thuan EPZ has been operating for more than 30 years since 1991, so the dominant floor task is refurbishment inside a running plant, not a new floor on bare ground. A concrete substrate used for many years can vary sharply from one area to another: old coatings, oil that has soaked in over time, cracked joints and areas repaired in the past all affect how well a new coating will bond. Coating directly over such a substrate without treating those points risks the new layer peeling with the old one.
Work in this zone therefore starts from a substrate record for each area, and only then moves to coating. That record notes moisture inside the concrete, the concrete’s present strength, the pattern of cracks, old oil staining and the repair history of that particular area, rather than one survey result applied across the whole zone. From that record, the crew grinds the floor, repairs cracks and treats moisture where the record calls for it, then applies primer and coating one section at a time: one area is finished and handed back to production before work moves to the next, so export schedules are not held up by a single flooring job. An area is handed back only after its closing checks: the coating shows no peeling and no ponding, thickness has been measured at several different points, a forklift has run and turned at the heaviest-loaded point, and the area has had enough time to dry and harden fully before heavy goods vehicles return. The city-level overview that this deep dive extends is Epoxy Flooring for Industrial Parks in Ho Chi Minh City and Nearby Areas; the sequence above is tied here to Tan Thuan’s own functional areas and to each tenant’s export and shutdown calendar.
For advice that fits the actual site, a tenant should send five items with the enquiry: the measured area of each zone, the present condition of the floor, the type of production, the vehicles moving on the floor, and the shutdown dates already planned. With those five items, a contractor can orient the system choice by zone and schedule a survey; a firm price can only be fixed once the survey is complete and the substrate condition and system for each area are known.
The conversion proposal, stated honestly
Nothing in this section is a decided fact. HEPZA has submitted a pilot-conversion proposal to the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee covering five zones — Tan Thuan, Tan Binh, Cat Lai, Binh Chieu and Hiep Phuoc — toward high-tech, green and low-emission models. For Tan Thuan, the stated direction is to attract high-tech projects after its land lease ends in 2041. The year 2041 is the reported lease horizon only; it carries no specific day and no conversion completion date.
In parallel, TTC has proposed converting Tan Thuan toward a high-tech and science-technology innovation industrial park, in stages: high-value-added manufacturing first, then a combination of production, training and research. The proposal includes a proposed innovation park of about 43.3 hectares linked to universities and research institutes, and a proposed land-use extension of 20 years, to 2061. Both the 43.3-hectare figure and the 2061 year are proposal figures only, not approved-plan figures, and no approval date or completion date is given in the sources.
For a floor decision made today, that distinction is the point. A long-life floor should not be chosen on the basis of the conversion proposal, but on three verifiable grounds: the remaining lease confirmed in writing by the operator or the managing authority, the tenant’s own standard, and the surveyed condition of the substrate. The proposal is a reason to ask further questions about the zone’s future, not a basis for claiming the zone has already become a high-tech park or for selecting a more expensive system on the grounds that conversion is imminent.
What to ask before signing
Before signing a flooring contract inside Tan Thuan EPZ, a tenant should put five questions in writing, answered area by area. What has the substrate record for each area measured, and which weakness of that area will be treated before coating? Why does the proposed system fit that particular functional area, rather than one system for the whole zone? How is the phased programme sequenced against the plant’s shutdown calendar and its import and export schedule — which area first, which area next? At handover of each area, which items will be checked and measured before that area carries load again? And, for long-life floors, how will the operator or the managing authority confirm the lease and land-use horizon in writing — that confirmation comes from the operator or authority, not from a flooring contractor.
This article distinguishes Tan Thuan EPZ from Hiep Phuoc Industrial Park, a different park in Nha Be with its own floor story, and sits alongside another single-park article for the same city, Tan Tao Industrial Park. Each park has its own floor map; the right decision for Tan Thuan is the one based on this zone’s functional areas, its substrate condition and its lease horizon.
Photo: Ollie Craig on Pexels. Stock illustration of a general logistics yard, not a Kadier project and not Tan Thuan EPZ itself (photographed in Scotland).
