THESE are testing times indeed for Vietnam's emerging oil industry, the country's most valuable export sector.
Total of France has pulled out of the project to build the country's first oil refinery and now, according to company sources, Australia's industrial giant BHP is looking at shutting down production at one of only three fields now in production.
Both moves mark the first signs of a stark commercial realism creeping into all manner of foreign business deals across Vietnam as the hype and blather that followed the lifting of the US economic embargo last year has cleared.
Sober financial decisions are being made at the possible expense of vital relationships and contacts within Vietnam's extensive and exhaustive bureaucracy - still firmly Hanoi-based with the Communist Party strong at its centre.
Vietnam's leaders have never pretended its administration doesn't need cleaning up or its laws re-written, but now foreign investors are starting to insist their words count.
The case of BHP is going to test flexibility with its thinly-veiled ultimatum.