FPT Corporation is a top information technology and telecom company in Vietnam. In the past years, FPT has made important contributions to social development. To give a more comprehensive view of the steps a leading ICT company in Vietnam takes to integrate social responsibility into its development strategy, Vietnam Business Forum has an interview with Ms Truong Thi Thanh Thanh, Director of FPT HCM, on this issue. Quynh Ngoc -Le Sang report.
The economic downturn wrecked many Vietnamese enterprises, but FPT Corporation still attained growth. Could you talk about major solutions FPT took to reach these optimistic results?
Economic recession is also the chance for us to arrange and “tidy up” our business in the smartest way. FPT focused on its strengths and core value, information technology, to develop.
During this time, FPT concentrated on improving internal governance, training future management, and selecting capable leaders to withstand hardships and make preparations for the next stage of development. In its business strategy, FPT always harmoniously combines three elements: Profit, People and Planet, to ensure sustainable development.
What does CSR mean to winning companies, specifically FPT?
As we know, in developed countries, CSR is considered a clearly profitable investment. But in Vietnam, CSR is not given enough attention. The CSR Awards play an important role in popularising the significance and practical benefits that social responsibility generates, thus promoting corporate commitments to sustainable economic development.
Furthermore, CSR Awards help build a good image for the company in the eyes of employees, investors, and customers. This is one of the important factors for the company to overcome current difficulties.
In recent years, the group has deployed many big CSR programmes and projects which attracted broad participation from FPT staff and the volunteer community across the country. Would you mind talking about some typical ones?
FPT is the first private enterprise in Vietnam to have a traditional day for all the staff to spend time thinking or contributing a practical action to the community. Since 2010, March 13 was named the Community Day of FPT Group. Each year, FPT picks a specific theme of social responsibility and deploys the CSR programme.
FPT Community Programme 2012 bore the message "Sharing pains, bringing smiles" to cancer patients. FPT gave VND527 million, 2,700 gifts, 500 meal rations and 670 blood units, and organised 15 sharing programmes for cancer patients. In 2013, FPT chose the message "Giving books, adding wings to dreams" with the aim of presenting 25 book sets, equivalent 25,000 books, to poor schools across the country.
The group also utilises its technological strengths to support social development like coordinating with the Ministry of Education and Training to organise online math contests, Violympic, for students from primary to high school levels, attracting more than 11 million members; supporting technologies to build the largest country-wide volunteer network, Vicongdong, attracting more than 50,000 members from over 500 voluntary groups. The Vicongdong Network also successfully hosted Swallow Volunteer Award, which encourages individuals and organisations to contribute more to the community.
In addition, FPT incubates young talents with its study encouragement funds, scholarships and new training polices.
Mr Nguyen Tien Tung, Deputy Chief Inspector of the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, remarked that what FPT has done is very meaningful because it turns the company into the second home of employees. Actually, this is easier said than done. Do you have anything to share with us about this effort?
As usual, we spend eight hours a day sleeping, eight hours working and eight hours doing other activities. Perhaps, our time at work is longer than the time we are at home. So, FPT often organises cultural activities to uphold traditional values and improve the spiritual life of our employees to inspire them to work and ease working pressure.
Each year, FPT organises many traditional days, both of the country and of FPT Corporation, like the FPT Community Day (March 13); FPT Sports Day (March 26); Towards the Source Day (the 10th day of the third lunar month) in commemoration of national history and promoting patriotism, national pride and self-respect; FPT Arts Day (May 19) with cultural, arts, music and dance performances to enrich the lives of FPT staff; FPT Foundation Day (September 13) with many activities to preserve FPT traditional values; FPT Family Day (third Saturday in November) - the day for FPT Corporation and FPT people to thank their parents and spouses; FPT Festival (22nd day of the last lunar month of the year) - an event ahead of Traditional Lunar New Year organised with the desire of creating a festival space typical of Vietnamese culture for FPT people to share the feeling after a year of hard work; and FPT New Employee Day (first Saturday every month) - the event to welcome our new employees.
In addition, FPT has many other cultural activities at lower levels organised throughout the year. The corporation also has many hobby clubs.
As an outstanding company in social activities, do you have any ideas to make the CSR Awards more effective and more meaningful?
I think we need to bring together enterprises to form pro-sustainability associations and intensify communication activities to uphold the spirit of the awards to more entrepreneurs and executives.
Vietnamese
