New opportunities open for tech sector

"To effectively implement national digital transformation, it essentially requires us to have a methodical strategy, focused implementation, and create changes in management, operation, administration methodology and society." - Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, Photo: Nhat Bac

FPT Semiconductor and Silvaco, the US-based leading provider of TCAD and EDA software, made a new step in late September, on its path to international growth by advancing human resources development in the semiconductor sector, with plans to establish a training centre in Vietnam and expand business in advanced tech areas.

This move is part of FPT’s new strategy to focus on semiconductor technology, according to Nguyen Van Khoa, general director of FPT at a media briefing held last week.

“We will increase the proportion of revenue from products and technology solutions. In the near future, you will see more FPT’s products and solutions come to life,” he said. “We aim our technology solutions to create happiness for not only Vietnam but the whole world.”

At a meeting held by the Government Office and the Ministry of Information and Communications to celebrate National Digital Transformation Day on October 10, FPT announced how the company’s presence in 29 countries and status as leading partner alongside hundreds of the world’s largest enterprises is bringing make-in-Vietnam to the world.

Specifically, AkaBot and FPT.AI are the innovations making the most noise for FPT on the international stage. AkaBot is a robotic process automation solution that has been named in the top six business process solutions in the world, while FPT.AI has 200 million users per month from 15 countries.

FPT is developing the size of the US and Japanese markets, improving its position in the value chain from services to the step-by-step provision of products such as chips. FPT’s overseas revenue in 2022 reached $800 million, with the plan to reach $1 billion by the end of 2023.

FPT is already one of Vietnam’s success stories in bringing digital products and platforms to foreign markets. Other outstanding names in this regard include Viettel, FPT, CMC, TMA, Rikkeisoft, and NTQ.

Similarly, Vietnamese-owned Rikkeisoft made success from going global from Japan. It is now Vietnam’s second-largest technology enterprise in Japan. Rikkeisoft provides technology consulting and digital transformation services for large enterprises and corporations throughout Japan and is now expanding to other markets such as the US, Singapore, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand. By 2028, Rikkeisoft has its sights on becoming a billion-dollar technology enterprise and launching an IPO in the United States.

Viettel currently invests in 10 countries throughout Asia, America, and Africa, with a total market of 270 million people and 68 million customers. Last year, the company’s revenue from foreign markets reached $3 billion and now it is targeting a 100 per cent return on investment, along with a 4G subscription rate of 65 per cent in the markets where Viettel invests, most notably in Asia and Peru, by 2025.

Alongside smart manufacturing and smart ports, going abroad is a focal point on the roadmap to national digital transformation laid out on the National Digital Transformation Day in October 2022.

Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh said that enterprises are the decisive factor in ensuring success in national digital transformation. He said that “to effectively implement national digital transformation, it essentially requires us to have a methodical strategy, focused implementation, and create changes in management, operation, administration methodology and society.

The government’s entire perspective is to take people and businesses as the centre, the subjects, the goals, the driving forces and the resources of digital transformation.”

This year is aimed to enhance national digital data, with the government asking ministries and agencies to create clearer policies, sturdier infrastructure and to have smarter management of digital data in order to open more opportunities to domestic and international businesses.

The first step to achieving this is to have ministries, agencies and localities focus collectively on completing policies for digital infrastructure, digital platforms and digital human resources to promote stable and sustainable development of digital data.

They will need early development of technical standards and regulations on digital data, alongside a shared data portfolio to manage information and data quality, to regularly monitor and evaluate digital data, and to enable the newly improved values of productivity, quality, and efficiency.

Secondly, ministries, agencies and localities are urged to promote data creation through building, developing, connecting, cleaning, sharing and exploiting national and specialised databases, while submitting investment plans to build a national data centre to authorised agencies.

Crucially, the Ministry of Public Security (MoPS), the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC), the Ministry of Construction, and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment have been tasked with researching the potential to add national digital address information to the national population database. Other challenges issued to the ministries include integrating electronic identification accounts with the national real estate exchange system and national land database system, as well as declaring digital addresses of individuals and organisations on VNeID to ensure compliance with current regulations.

This work is to be done alongside the work of the State Securities Commission, which is tasked with connecting the national population database to clean the data of people participating in securities transactions. The MoPS and Vietnam Social Insurance Security have also been tasked with researching and proposing solutions to integrate the social insurance book on the VNeID application to ensure efficiency. In addition, the Ministry of Health has been tasked with coordinating with the MoPS to instruct medical facilities and the general population to use electronic health book information on VneID.

Ministries, agencies and localities are also required to boost investment in developing, upgrading, and modernising digital infrastructure, especially shared infrastructure, payment infrastructure and credit information infrastructure, as well as ensuring computing capacity, transmission, stability, reliability and safety in building digital database systems.

This is to be done alongside improving the quality of online public services by restructuring processes and digitising documents.

Reports of all the tasks must be reported to the prime minister before November 30.

MIC Minister Nguyen Manh Hung said, “We have entered the fourth year of digital transformation, with 2023 being the year of national digital data.

This is a year of creating practical results, and using new technology, high technology, and especially AI to solve specific problems in Vietnam and beyond.”

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