Over 50 representatives from 33 American firms, including financial powerhouse Citigroup and aircraft manufacturer Boeing, are in the communist nation to explore opportunities and sign contracts, business groups said.
While rapprochement and reconciliation are high on the Presidential agenda, forces in corporate America seem to be saying it is time to increase bilateral trade and business ties.
Mission leader Lionel Johnson, Citigroup vice president, said a number of U.S. firms have been operating in Vietnam since the mid-1990s following Clinton's 1994 lifting of a crippling trade embargo and normalisation of diplomatic relations the following year.
"We want to join the President in strengthening those ties and increasing opportunities between our countries," Johnson said in a statement provided by the U.S. ASEAN Business Council.
Clinton, in turn, is scheduled to address the U.S.-Vietnam business forum in Ho Chi Minh City on Sunday.
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Norman Mineta is expected to preside over the signing of an agreement between Boeing and flagship Vietnam Airlines in which the carrier would commit to buy three Boeing jet aircraft for its expanding fleet, an executive said.
A host of smaller but significant information technology deals are expected to be inked as well, sources have said.
Bilateral trade is currently just a fraction of Vietnam's 11.5 billion dollars in exports and 11.6 billion dollars in imports.
During the first eight months of this year, U.S. trade with Vietnam totaled 783 million dollars, up from 510 million dollars during the same period in 1999, the business council reported.
That is expected to change, perhaps dramatically, with the implementation of the recently signed bilateral trade agreement, said U.S.-ASEAN Business Council director Frances Zwenig.
"The trade agreement offers the potential for significant new trade and investment between the U.S. and Vietnam," she said.
"We will be meeting with potential business partners as well as government officials to explore those opportunities."
Few U.S. firms have anything to show for their investments. Most early-bird American entrepreneurs have left Vietnam, with many nursing their wounds. Some major companies have also pulled out.
Ho Chi Minh City along with New Dehli, Istanbul, Managua in Nigaragua and Cuba's Havana were meanwhile named the worst places business cities in the world in the annual survey by Fortune Magazine released on Wednesday.
A similar delegation of top U.S. executives, all of them Vietnam veterans, came to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in April ahead of the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.
(la/dpa)