Vietnam Coffee Exports: Volume Up, Revenue Down – Who’s Eating Your Margin?

News Overview

In the first half of 2026, Vietnam’s coffee export sector faced a notable paradox: export volume increased while total export revenue declined. In plain terms, businesses sold more coffee but brought home less money. This isn’t a typo in the news headline – it’s the operational reality that anyone in coffee export trading has been feeling on their bottom line for months.

What the Numbers Actually Say

I’ve worked with several coffee export businesses through Alibaba and other B2B channels over the years. This scenario is nothing new. Global prices have been volatile, particularly Robusta prices on the London exchange, which saw sharp corrections after the strong rally of 2023-2024. When prices trend downward, even if you export more tons, total revenue can still come in negative compared to the same period last year.

The critical point here: this is a pricing problem, not a volume problem. Businesses that only track export volume without closely monitoring futures price movements easily fall into the trap of thinking “as long as we’re selling, we’re fine” – while real profit margins get eaten away day by day.

Ho Alva’s Insight

I’ll say it plainly: this is the clearest sorting period between coffee businesses that know how to manage pricing and those that only know how to sell. In 5 years running export operations, I’ve seen this exact pattern repeat across many agricultural sectors – especially coffee, pepper, and cashew. When global prices drop, whoever doesn’t have forward contracts or hasn’t diversified their markets gets hit first and hardest.

A real example: back in 2022, I supported an agricultural export business on Alibaba that signed long-term contracts with fixed pricing 6 months in advance. When global prices dropped 12% afterward, this business maintained stable profit margins because they had locked in pricing early. Meanwhile competitors selling on spot basis lost nearly their entire quarterly profit.

The real question isn’t “how many tons did I export” – it’s “what percentage of profit margin am I keeping per container”. This is the difference between running a trading business and running a contract manufacturing operation.

Opportunities for SMEs

First, this is a good time to reassess your customer structure. If you’re 100% dependent on 1-2 traditional markets, such as only selling through domestic intermediaries, try expanding into B2B platforms like Alibaba to reach importers directly and cut out the middleman margin.

Second, businesses with in-house deep processing capacity, such as roasting, grinding, or instant coffee production, will be less affected than those exporting raw green beans only. Deep-processed product margins tend to be 15-20% more stable than raw exports, since they’re less directly tied to spot market price swings.

Third, this is also an opportunity to renegotiate terms with importing partners toward more flexible pricing arrangements, such as index-linked pricing instead of fixed pricing per individual order, which helps reduce two-way volatility risk.

Risk Warnings

The biggest risk right now is the mindset of “prices are dropping, so let’s sell even more to make up for it.” This is a classic mistake I’ve witnessed repeatedly: businesses push export volume harder when prices are falling, and the result is the more they sell, the more they lose, because logistics costs and harvest labor costs don’t decrease proportionally.

The second risk is exchange rate exposure. When USD revenue drops but input costs in VND, labor and domestic transport, stay the same, profit margins converted back to VND get squeezed even harder than the published revenue figures suggest.

The third risk: if you don’t have forward contracts or price hedging tools in place, you’re leaving your business completely exposed to international exchange volatility with zero protective layer.

Is your business exporting coffee by locking in prices early, or selling at whatever the market rate is at the moment? And if prices continue falling next quarter, do you already have a plan to protect your profit margin?