Going digital and green in partnership with Ericsson

How can 5G and digital transformation impact the performance of industries such as manufacturing, logistics, agriculture and e-commerce over the coming years?

Denis Brunetti, president of Ericsson in Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos

As a critical digital national infrastructure, 5G has the potential to significantly transform society, industries, and the economy, as well as benefiting the environment. In the past, developing economies depended on traditional inputs to fuel growth, such as low-cost labour and natural resources.

Moving forward, the new economy will increasingly depend on more sustainable inputs, such as science, technology and innovation, whereby data will become the new oil that creates as much as drives a more inclusive and sustainable socioeconomic development, securing broader range prosperity for all.

Through 5G, the introduction of Industry 4.0 will be accelerated across thousands of factory floors in Vietnam, enabling robots, digital twin technology, automatic guided vehicles, remote inventory tracking, and predictive maintenance to bring vastly improved efficiency and increased safety to production facilities. As well as helping increase the nation’s labour productivity growth rate towards 7.5 per cent per annum, it will also stimulate increased high-tech foreign direct investment and attract significantly more smart manufacturing investment to Vietnam over the coming years.

This is crucially important, especially as we expect almost 70 per cent of the world’s multinational corporations to have their manufacturing hubs reside in Asia-Pacific within this decade.

Similarly, we see agriculture, mining, logistics, energy, transport, healthcare, and education, among other industries, all benefiting from high speed, secure and reliable mobile broadband capabilities over the coming years, driving improved productivity, and increased efficiencies across all economic sectors, whilst concurrently providing a platform for innovation.

Indeed, 5G is an innovation platform that will help create new Internet of Things use cases, companies, and industries, that will in turn create new jobs of the future centred around data science and technology. This is particularly important as we expect over 70 per cent of jobs to be in the field of science, technology and innovation by 2050.

Vietnam’s national strategies highlight the importance of digital transformation in driving Vietnam’s next wave of inclusive and sustained development. How can technology and 5G support the country’s vision?

5G has the uniquely secure and reliable high-speed capability, coupled with very low latency to drive increased automation across all industries, including manufacturing, agriculture, energy, logistics, transport, mining, healthcare, finance, banking, and education, among others. For this reason, 5G is the ideal technology and mobile network capability that the government has highlighted in its digital transformation and Industry 4.0 strategy and vision to 2030. The government has created and articulated an obvious strategy and vision that Ericsson fully endorses and supports through our existing 4G and future 5G capabilities and plans in Vietnam.

As part of our 30-year anniversary in Vietnam in 2023, Ericsson reaffirms its commitment to strategically partner with Vietnam to unleash the full potential and value of 5G to society, business, industry, the economy, and the environment.

As well as consuming less energy than 4G, 5G technology will enable industries to digitally transform and reduce their energy requirements and subsequent carbon footprint. At Ericsson, we aim to achieve net-zero CO2 emissions by 2040 across our total supply chain, whilst achieving net-zero emissions in our production environments by 2030.

We commend and applaud the government of Vietnam for its ambition to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, with an expected 75 per cent of energy coming from renewable energy sources by 2045. Ericsson is committed to supporting Vietnam in achieving this objective through our partnership with Vietnam’s mobile operators, as well as through our strategic collaboration with Electricity of Vietnam. 5G will help support the seamless integration of renewable energy sources, such as wind, hydro and solar, into the existing energy grid.

How does Ericsson’s strategy align with Vietnam’s future digital transformation and sustainable development strategies?

Ericsson trusts that the commercialisation of 5G will deliver the triple bottom-line benefit to Vietnam – social, economic, and environmental benefits. It places its full trust and confidence in the Vietnam government’s vision and socioeconomic plans that are aimed at driving a sustained socioeconomic trajectory for continued prosperity for all the people of Vietnam.

We fully support the government’s ambition to become a regional AI hub in ASEAN, as well as a top 40 country on the Global Innovation Index, top 30 in the International Telecommunication Union’s Global Cybersecurity Index and top 50 in the United Nation’s e-government Development Index by 2030. As well as building high-performance mobile broadband networks across the country, we are supporting the government in achieving these ambitions by investing in a joint Industry/Academia partnership with RMIT University through the establishment of an AI lab at their Ho Chi Minh City Campus in Q2 of 2023.

We’re also creating a regional cloud factory competence hub in Vietnam, comprising Vietnamese engineers that will work across the region, helping further develop Vietnam’s local IT competence and capabilities.

We also continue to collaborate with a range of local universities in Vietnam with our Tech Talk series and internship scheme to further advance digital IT skills, helping further develop the human resource capacity requirements in Vietnam to support jobs of the future.

As an example, we strategically partnered with RMIT University in Vietnam in 2022 as part of our Ericsson Educate initiative, opening our digital education portal for RMIT students studying 5G and related technologies.

How important is the partnership among businesses, and between businesses and the state, to support Vietnam on this journey?

Every country and market has its own path and journey, and Vietnam is very well-placed as one of the most dynamic and attractive investment destinations in the world with a fast-growing digital economy and strategic focus on nationwide digital transformation. Ericsson fully supports and endorses this vision, and we are committed to helping Vietnam achieve this important ambition.

We are proud to be a trusted and valued strategic long-term partner of Vietnam, sharing our global insights, expertise, and experiences with Vietnam. The future of the ICT industry is to digitally transform all other industries, and we are committed to partnering with the government of Vietnam is driving accelerated digital transformation across all economic sectors through our 4G and 5G capabilities, as well as 6G looking further ahead.

We jointly understand and appreciate the importance of digital transformation, enabled by 5G as a critical digital national infrastructure, as a key driver for improved labour productivity growth rates and efficiencies across all industries, especially manufacturing/production, logistics, agriculture, and energy, among others.

We believe in the triple helix model that promotes government/industry/academia collaboration. Ericsson trusts in the value of collaboration in helping solve some of the leading challenges facing Vietnam, as with most countries, such as tackling climate change, digitally transforming the economy for improved efficiency, attracting high-tech funding, improving labour productivity growth rates, creating new high-tech jobs, and driving startup entrepreneurship and innovation.

What are Ericsson’s key pressures now and how does it deal with them?

We value and respect our competition, as it makes us better as well as the industry. Ericsson has already helped launch over 140 commercial 5G networks globally with our customers, and we’re a leading global 5G infrastructure vendor according to Gartner Magic Quadrant reports over the past three consecutive years.

As a long term and trusted strategic partner to Vietnam since 1993, Ericsson will continue to share our global 5G experience with our customers in Vietnam, helping ensure successful coverage and capacity deployments with resilient network performance, scalability, simplicity and security as a primary focus.

The key to our sustained success as a global company since 1876, operating across 185 countries with over 100,000 today, is our technology leadership. We contribute about 16 per cent of our annual turnover to research and development each year, with over 26,000 people employed in related roles across the world. Technology leadership, coupled with operational excellence, global scale, and skills are key ingredients.

We also have strong core values that bind all our people across all our operations around the world, and they are respect, professionalism, perseverance, and integrity. Our corporate culture, our people culture, as much as our competence and capabilities, is what binds us and guides our decision-making and way forward. Through our sustained long-term journey of almost 150 years, we have also had our challenges, and we have learned from those experiences, becoming stronger and ever more resilient as a company.

We pride ourselves on making the world a better place through our technology leadership and our people, and we are proudly committed to Vietnam as a long term strategic partner that shares in a common vision for the country’s sustained socioeconomic prosperity.