Shanghai International Home Expo has learned that the "Going Global・Vietnam Dialogue" event, hosted by Furniture Today, was held in Binh Duong New City, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. This marks the first time the "Furniture Today・Going Global" event series has been held outside China. The event brought together industry representatives from home furnishing manufacturing, supply chain support, and technical services in both China and Vietnam for in-depth discussions on global home furnishing supply chain restructuring, Vietnam's manufacturing landscape, factory cost control and efficiency enhancement, intelligent upgrading, cross-border logistics coordination, and practical experience in overseas expansion—exploring new development paths for home furnishing exports in the post-dividend era. The environment for home furnishing overseas expansion continues to evolve: trade tariff rules are tightening, rules-of-origin compliance thresholds are rising, Vietnam's local labor, factory, and management costs are increasing year by year, and demand in the U.S. end market is under pressure. As global furniture orders are redistributed among China, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries, the industry's old low-cost export logic has been thoroughly upended, and Vietnam's home furnishing manufacturing has formally entered a new phase of refined, high-quality competition.

At the event, Yan Dong, Publisher of Furniture Today, stated that Vietnam, with its mature industrial chain support, has become the primary first stop for Chinese home furnishing companies expanding overseas and an important window for observing global supply chain changes. Going forward, the "Going Global" event series will continue to establish a presence in overseas markets, deepen its focus on home furnishing exports, and help Chinese companies pursue global development. Gao Dandan, Editor-in-Chief of Furniture Today, released the keynote report "Big Data Insights: Flow, Transformation, and Opportunities in the China–Vietnam–US Home Furnishing Supply Chain," drawing on the proprietary FTCFE export data system and customs import-export big data to review two decades of changes in the China–Vietnam–U.S. home furnishing trade landscape and precisely dissect the patterns of global supply chain iteration and new industry opportunities. The report divides over 20 years of global home furnishing supply chain development into three phases: 2001–2018, the cost-globalization phase, in which China became the global furniture manufacturing center by virtue of production and supply chain advantages; 2018–2024, when U.S.–China trade frictions drove a large-scale transfer of Chinese production capacity to Vietnam and Southeast Asia; and 2025 to the present, when the industry has decisively moved beyond simple production relocation and entered a new cycle of multi-node, global supply chain configuration.

Import and export data directly confirm the deep restructuring of the supply chain landscape. In 2018, China accounted for 55% of U.S. furniture imports, significantly ahead of Vietnam's 17% share. In 2021, China and Vietnam held equal shares at 31% each, a key turning point in the industry's supply chain. By 2024, Vietnam's share had climbed to 43% while China's had fallen to 19%. The U.S. end market continues to adjust: U.S. furniture imports totaled $52.01 billion in 2025, down 8.2% year-on-year, and import volume continued to decline 13.1% year-on-year in the first half of 2026. Vietnam has now been the largest source of U.S. furniture imports for multiple consecutive years, with exports to the U.S. reaching $14.48 billion in 2025. Meanwhile, furniture export growth in Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Cambodia continues to accelerate, intensifying regional competition.

China's furniture export structure has also undergone optimization and adjustment. FTCFE data show that China's total furniture exports reached 474.8 billion yuan in 2025, down 5.2% year-on-year, with the decline narrowing to 0.8% in the first half of 2026, indicating overall stabilization. Market diversification has yielded notable results: the share of Chinese furniture exports to the U.S. fell from 27.5% in 2022 to 22.8% in 2025, remaining essentially flat in the first half of 2026. Concentration in leading export markets continues to decline, with the share of the top 30 destination countries falling from 89.1% to 83.8%, confirming a clear trend toward market diversification. By product category, the supply chain division of labor is clear: Vietnam has large-scale manufacturing advantages in finished product categories such as wood-frame upholstered seating, wooden bedroom furniture, and wooden kitchen furniture, while China excels in upstream support areas including furniture components, hardware, fabrics, foam, and electronic control accessories. This stable China–Vietnam supply chain collaboration model is also the core competitive foundation for current home furnishing exports.

Beyond macro-level supply chain pattern，internal factory cost control, efficiency enhancement, and technological upgrading have become key levers for exporters to break through. Yang Jun, an expert in upholstered home furnishing R&D and manufacturing and General Manager of Jingfeng Intelligence, pointed out in his presentation that home furnishing manufacturing costs are not primarily reduced through production and procurement—their core source lies in front-end R&D and design. A product's cost structure, production efficiency, and material waste are largely determined at the design-finalization stage. Companies need to achieve systematic cost reduction and efficiency gains through parametric design, product structure standardization, material generalization, and process normalization, paired with intelligent and flexible production line upgrades. These standardization and digital transformation approaches are particularly well-suited to Vietnamese factories, effectively alleviating local pain points such as skilled labor shortages, insufficient labor efficiency, and rising labor costs, reducing production's dependence on manual labor and building long-term, stable efficiency advantages.

Alongside the overseas expansion of manufacturing capacity, China's quality supply chains and core technical support are also achieving global export. E-control, a smart electronic control solutions company, shared that current home furnishing intelligence competition focuses on safety and practicality, and that core technologies such as anti-pinch features built on full-stack in-house R&D capabilities can be adapted to global end-product needs, providing differentiated upgrade advantages for exported furniture products. Cross-border logistics service provider EZOCEAN noted that home furnishing export competition is no longer limited to product manufacturing—integrated supply chain services spanning cross-border logistics, customs clearance, warehousing, and global delivery directly determine companies' delivery efficiency and supply chain resilience, and a well-developed Southeast Asian localized logistics network is an important guarantee for stable overseas operations.

In the roundtable discussion, multiple companies with deep operations in Vietnam shared core pain points and breakthrough strategies based on practical experience. Companies widely reported that establishing a factory in Vietnam is not difficult—the challenge lies in subsequent refined operations and efficiency improvement. Initially, local Vietnamese employees' production efficiency is far lower than in China, but through optimized management systems and the implementation of piece-rate performance models, production efficiency can be significantly improved. Meanwhile, overseas buyers' decision-making logic has been comprehensively upgraded: they no longer focus solely on price, quality, and delivery time but also incorporate tariff compliance, origin certification, labor compliance, and supply chain security into their procurement evaluation systems. To diversify risk, overseas orders continue to flow to more Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Cambodia, and Vietnam's exclusive dividend has completely faded. In response, companies operating in Vietnam are proactively expanding into European, Latin American, and Vietnamese domestic markets to reduce dependence on the single U.S. market, with diversified layout becoming a normalized choice.

Overall, the home furnishing export industry has left behind the low-cost dividend era, shifting from simple production relocation and cost arbitrage to a competition of comprehensive strength encompassing compliance, technology, efficiency, and global resource allocation. As an important first stop for Chinese home furnishing companies going overseas, Vietnam's industrial changes, competitive landscape, and operational pain points are a microcosm of the entire industry's globalization upgrade. Shanghai International Home Expo expects that Furniture Today will continue to hold overseas industry events, gain deep insights into global supply chain changes, and help Chinese home furnishing companies build long-term global competitiveness and achieve high-quality overseas development.

Source: Furniture Today