Electronic Bidding - A Growing Trend

The Ministry of Planning and Investment hosted a conference to review its pilot online bidding in the 2012 - 2013 period and propose the schedule for online bidding in the following years. Deputy Minister Dao Quang Thu said if cleverly applied, this form of tender will improve the publicity and transparency in bidding events. This partly reflects the resolution of the Party and the Government in the fight against bureaucracy and corruption. And, this is also the clearest commitment of Vietnam to international donors.

 

Mr Nguyen Son, Deputy Director of Procurement Management Department (MPI), said, in the coming time, the Ministry of Planning and Investment is quickly compiling decrees and circulars on the enforcement of Bidding Law 2013, which specifies online bidding. In the 2012 - 2013 period, the ministry actively disseminated information about this type of bidding and trained personnel for this. Specifically, it organised more than 60 training courses on online bidding for investors, bid solicitors and bidders at ministries, branches and localities across the country. More than 4,000 staffs from 30 ministries, localities, economic groups and corporations were trained.

 

Mr Le Van Tang, Director of the Public Procurement Agency (MPI), said, units nationwide successfully carried out over 1,000 online bids by the end of 2013. All activities related to these events like bid plan announcements, bid invitation announcements, bidding document filing, bid opening and bid result announcement were made on the system. More than 9,200 bid plans and over 57,000 bid invitation announcements were published. More than 7,400 tenderers and over 2,600 bidders registered to use the system. He said, to further improve this new "institution," the Ministry of Planning and Investment introduced solutions to perfect this apparatus like ensuring smooth and stable system operation around the clock, providing supports to users via various channels like telephone, e-mail and especially intuitive remote instruments to instruct and reply investors, tenderers and bidders to publish bid information and host online bidding.

 

Remarkably, the number of users (auctioneers, bidders and registrants) in the 2012 - 2013 period increased sharply over the 2009 - 2011 phase. Specifically, the number of registered users soared 500 percent, the number of bidders jumped 650 percent and the number of auctioneers surged 460 percent. Online bids increased nearly 20 folds. The number of bid invitation announcements and bid plan announcements increased almost 3 times and 11 times, respectively.

 

Mr Nguyen Son said online bidding is a growing development trend in the world, particularly in developed countries. The European Union (EU) has long adopted electronic bidding and all EU members are obliged to apply this method from 2015. In Vietnam, online bidding, if applied broadly, will help cut State budgets, reduce travel and printing costs as well as diminish bad deeds. It will also help approach international practices and standards - an extremely important condition for Vietnam to finalise TPP negotiations.

 

In Singapore and South Korea, online bidding is reported to save 3-20 percent of bid value. In Vietnam, the total value of auction packages bid every year is over US$20 billion. Therefore, expanding online auctions will contribute billions of US dollars to the State Budget annually.

 

However, according to Mr Le Van Tang, the biggest obstacles to online bidding is enterprises dislike explaining too much to authorities about their online bidding processes. Another barrier is our limited information technology level and technical infrastructure. Notably, legal validity and digital signatures in online bidding have not been fully recognised.

 

An official from the Department of Planning and Investment of Hanoi City said the department planned to launch 10 tender packages online in 2013 but eventually finished just three packages with this method because of low IT level. In professional aspect, the Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT) easily pointed out these inadequacies. Bidding online is a form of advanced information technology application. The current system supports only Internet Explorer (IE), the web browser developed by Microsoft, versions 6.0-10.0 while the latest version, IE 11, is not supported. A representative from the World Bank Group (WB) said that online bidding is really becoming a major trend of the world. In the Plan to 2025, it pledged to support Vietnam to invite leading specialists of this field as well as provide more support for Vietnam in this field.

 

Director Le Van Tang said the wide-scale application of online bidding is very feasible, with an estimated budget of VND300 billion (US$14.4 million), the second phase of the project will be launched in May 2014 and expected to be continued in 2015 if approved. And, difficulties and obstacles in online bidding will be collected and addressed. Driven by information measures, this form of bidding is expected to account for higher proportion, he added.