Despite accounting for just 0.4 per cent of the country’s GDP, the Vietnamese software sector has affirmed its important role in the national economic development. This is proved by the fact that Vietnam has been named in the world’s top ten countries in software outsourcing under the latest report by A.T. Kearney, a global management consulting firm.
High growth
Statistics showed that the Vietnamese IT market has posted an annual growth rate of over 20 per cent for many years. Last year, the sector gained total revenue of US$4.5 billion, up 20 per cent on-year. Of this, the software sector made up some more than US$660 million, up 30 per cent on-year; the digital content industry reached over US$270 million, up nearly 50 per cent on-year and the hardware industry reached US$3.56 billion, including US$700 million for computer hardware, up 16 percent on-year.
These figures indicated that the electronic and hardware industry holds the big ratio in the local IT sector. However, IT experts said that software and digital content industry owns much potential and will bring in big profit in the coming time.
In the context of the current economic challenges, the domestic IT market has still maintained high growth. Besides, abundant financial capacity of firms like Dragon Capital, IFC, MEF and IDGVV and high expectations of big investors, including Intel, IBM and Canon prove the Vietnamese IT sector’s prospect.
Fastest progress
According to the latest research by A.T. Kearney, Vietnam gained the fastest progress in the list of the world’s most attractive nations in software outsourcing, climbing to the 10th in 2008 from the 19th in 2007.
Hanoi and HCM City are also ranked among Vietnamese cities which are attractive to software outsourcing investors. Last year, HCM City stood the fourth among 50 cities in emerging nations worldwide which are the most attractive to the software outsourcing.
In spite of accounting for a modest ratio in revenue (just 0.4 per cent of the country’s GDP), the Vietnamese software sector has affirmed its role in the nation’s socio-economic development. Over the past decade, the sector’s revenue has been up 18.5 folds with the annual rise of nearly 35 per cent. Currently, Vietnam is home to some 150 software outsourcing with an average scale of 100-150 labourers, particularly, several have more than 1,000 workers such as FPT software, FPT Information Systems, TMA and CSC. Two companies won certificate CMMI of level 5 and tens of firms won certificates CMM- 4 and CMM-3 or ISO-9001.
Investment in human resource
Vietnam’s software labour force has grown fast in line with the sector’s development scale. Currently, Vietnam has more than 50,000 software labourers. The number of IT training centres has increased 1.5 times from 2006 to 2008. IT training programmes have strongly developed and international IT training programmes have appeared in Vietnam such as SEG.
However, local software labourers are weak at foreign language skills, which discourages recruiters. Local training centres are trying to improve quality to meet companies’ increasing demand.
At a conference entitled Vietnam ICT Outlook 2009, Vice Director of the Ho Chi Minh Department for Information and Telecommunications Nguyen Anh Tuan said, the Vietnamese software sector has affirmed its proper development strategies from infrastructure development to investment capital scale and human resource development. He said that HCM City is now home to 25 IT regular training centres, supplying 20,000 IT workers per year for enterprises. HCM city is the first locality in Vietnam that built an IT human resource development fund. In May this year, the fund decided to approve a VND2-billion loan of free interest rate for FPT International Training Institute. This is the first project receiving the fund’s loan.
Nguyen Trong Duong, Head of the Department of Information Technology under the Ministry of Information and Communications said the Ministry is building a project to develop the local lT sector.
Thoa Nguyen
Vietnamese
