The ownership - efficiency relationship in a firm has always been an important topic. In this paper, we focus on the state owned versus non-state-owned status of Vietnamese manufacturing firms, to shed light into the relationship between these two variables when using a more state-of-the-art method as a stochastic meta-frontier method. Applying the method for two periods: one during the global economic crisis and the other after the end of the crisis, the study determines that in both periods, there was a strong evidence that non-state-owned firms performed much better than state owned counterpart. We also found that the difference became even larger during the harsh time and sub-industries with non-state-owned firms could outperform the state-owned firms, significantly.