(VOV)-Nearly 800 overseas Vietnamese from over 20 countries and territories joined a New Year get-together hosted by the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee yesterday/ on Monday to welcome the Lunar New Year (Tet) festival. HCM City People’s Committee Chairman Le Hoang Quan said the city highly values the contributions made by overseas Vietnamese to the cause of national construction and development in general and HCM city in particular. Quan said he hopes that overseas Vietnamese will continue to help boost national development and act as a bridge between Vietnam and international friends. 400 overseas Vietnamese experts and intellectuals have come back to live and work permanently in the city. Vietnamese expatriates have also invested in 2,500 businesses with a total capitalization of 2.4 billion USD.