A delegation of 21 Sri Lankan entrepreneurs spent six days in Vietnam this month seeking trade, investment and partnership deals, in a mission arranged by Sri Lanka’s embassy in Hanoi and reported by the Colombo Gazette on Sunday.
The COYLE delegation was led by its chairman, Suren Chandraratna, and travelled to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City from 8 to 13 October.
Delegates came from construction, engineering, renewable energy, information technology, digital transformation, packaging, food, agriculture, hospitality, automotive services and business consultancy — eleven sectors across 21 companies, which makes this a breadth-first mission rather than one built around a single industry.
What the programme covered
The visit opened on 8 October at the third Capital Economic Forum in Hanoi, where delegates and embassy officials met organisers and business representatives. The forum involved the Hanoi People’s Committee, the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Hanoi Association of Small and Medium Enterprises.
On 9 October, Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Vietnam, Poshitha Perera, and COYLE representatives met the chamber’s secretary general, Tran Thi Lan Anh. Those talks covered economic links and trade and investment opportunities, with specific attention to air connectivity and to businesses looking for partners in additional markets. The delegation also met Dinh Viet Hoa, founding chairman of the Vietnam National Association of Entrepreneurship.
The Ho Chi Minh City leg ran on 13 October, with meetings involving the Vietnam Association of Construction Contractors and the Vietnam Software and IT Services Association, plus business-to-business sessions with Vietnamese companies arranged by the embassy.
Air connectivity is the recurring thread
The attention paid to air links is the one item on the agenda with a visible counterpart in recent coverage. Vietnamese carrier VietJet is due to begin flying a Colombo–Maldives route from December, and direct capacity between the two countries remains the practical constraint on the kind of commercial relationships this mission was convened to build. Neither the embassy’s account nor the Colombo Gazette’s report connects the two, and no commitment on new routes is reported.
What was not announced
The report records no agreements signed, no memoranda of understanding, no investment figures and no value attached to any prospective deal. It describes the mission as having explored “practical cooperation opportunities and potential market expansion” — the language of a scoping visit, not a transaction. No participating company is named beyond the delegation’s chairman, and no follow-up date is given.
A note on the name
The Colombo Gazette renders the organisation as the “Chamber of Lankan Entrepreneurs”. The acronym COYLE stands for the Chamber of Young Lankan Entrepreneurs, and that is the body’s registered name; the filing appears to have dropped the middle word.
This article is single-sourced. The mission concluded on 13 October and was reported five days later, so the account is a retrospective summary of a completed visit rather than live coverage; no verified Sri Lankan newsroom other than the Colombo Gazette had filed on it at the time of writing.
