Why K-Dramas Own 40% of Vietnam's Streaming Market in 2026

If you have ever wondered where in Southeast Asia K-dramas are making the biggest cultural footprint, Vietnam has your answer. Forty percent of all streaming content consumed on major Vietnamese OTT platforms is Korean drama — a figure that puts Vietnam among the most K-drama-saturated markets anywhere in the world. For fans across Singapore, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok, Vietnam's streaming habits may be a preview of where the rest of the region is heading.

Vietnam's streaming market by the numbers

Vietnam's digital content market crossed the $500 million mark in 2025 and is on track to approach $600 million in 2026. The growth engine? Korean content. On FPT Play and VieON — the two largest local streaming platforms — four to five of the top-10 most-watched titles at any given time are Korean dramas. Netflix Vietnam tells the same story: Korean originals consistently outperform local Vietnamese productions in viewership.

The demographic fit is almost too perfect. Vietnam's population of roughly 100 million is 60% under the age of 35 — the exact age bracket that drives K-drama consumption globally. Add in urban, digitally-native viewers in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and Da Nang, and you have one of the most receptive K-drama audiences on earth.

Why Vietnam and K-dramas are such a natural match

The answer goes deeper than subtitles and streaming access. Vietnam and Korea share a Confucian cultural foundation — family loyalty, generational tension, and the pressure of social expectations are themes that land without any translation required. Vietnamese viewers, especially in family settings during Tết (Lunar New Year), find Korean family dramas and romantic melodramas immediately relatable in a way that Western series rarely achieve.

Researchers call this the cultural discount rate — roughly, how much a piece of content loses in relatability when it crosses a cultural border. Between Korea and Vietnam, that discount is among the lowest of any two countries in Asia. Korean studios can export a drama to Vietnam with minimal localization investment and still hit strong engagement numbers. The result is a feedback loop: more Korean content gets licensed, more Vietnamese viewers get hooked, and the market grows.

How K-dramas overtook Chinese dramas in Vietnam

It was not always K-dramas at the top. Through the mid-2010s, Chinese historical costume dramas (guzhuang ju) dominated Vietnamese OTT libraries. The shift happened around 2018–2019, accelerated by Netflix's entry into the Vietnamese market, which dramatically expanded access to Korean content with Vietnamese subtitles. After 2020, as Korean studios ramped up OTT original production quality, the gap between Korean and Chinese content widened further — and has not closed since.

The K-drama ripple effect: beauty, food, and tourism

This is where the data gets interesting for anyone tracking the Hallyu wave's economic reach across Southeast Asia. The numbers tell three separate stories:

• K-beauty: Korean cosmetics hold roughly 30% of the Vietnamese beauty market — overtaking French brands to rank first. Product placement in K-dramas is a direct driver: a serum or cushion foundation that appears in a hit series can sell out across Vietnamese e-commerce platforms within days. If you follow any Vietnamese beauty influencer on TikTok, you have already seen this pipeline in action.
• Food: Korean food imports into Vietnam rose 18% year-on-year in 2024. Korean fried chicken chains, ramyeon brands, and convenience-store snacks have all expanded rapidly on the back of drama-fueled food curiosity. Chimaek — Korea's iconic pairing of fried chicken and beer, similar to how Americans think of burgers and fries — has genuine buzz in Ho Chi Minh City's dining scene.
• Tourism: Vietnamese arrivals to South Korea hit approximately 600,000 in 2025, fully recovering to pre-pandemic levels. Many of these visitors are following filming locations, attending idol fan meetings, or building K-beauty skincare routine shopping trips they planned after bingeing a drama. The flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Seoul takes roughly five hours — short enough that a long weekend trip is realistic for the growing Vietnamese middle class.

One important caveat worth flagging: K-drama fandom does not automatically translate into long-term brand loyalty for Korean companies. Vietnamese local brands are benchmarking K-beauty aesthetics and manufacturing formulas at speed, which means Korean labels face real competition from domestic copycats riding the same Hallyu wave.

Where the relationship is heading: co-productions and two-way casting

The connection between Vietnam and Korea is no longer a one-way content export. Vietnamese production companies are entering co-production agreements with Korean studios. Vietnamese actors are appearing in Korean drama casts. In both directions, storytelling is quietly redefining the psychological distance between two countries that are only a four-to-five-hour flight apart.

For the second half of 2026, Vietnam's OTT market is projected to exceed $200 million USD. If Korean content maintains its current share, that is roughly $80 million in streaming revenue attributable to K-dramas alone — from a single Southeast Asian market. Multiply that logic across Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia, and the economic scale of the Hallyu wave in Southeast Asia becomes clear.