Vietnam’s telecom industry: the next stage of growth

What are the most disruptive trends in the telecom industry, and how are they shaping markets like Vietnam?

I think there are several fast-growing trends. I mentioned the five key trends earlier, and those really give an extensive view of where the industry is heading.

Jayanth Nagarajan, Asia-Pacific business leader at AWS

When it comes to Vietnam specifically, I see it as a real hotbed of innovation. I was there recently for AWS Cloud Day in Vietnam, and every time I visit, I'm struck by the energy and ambition in the market.

What we see, and what we love to support, is the hunger to build. The population is extremely tech-savvy, and we want to help amplify that. If you look at the training services we provide in Vietnam, the cloud adoption by the telcos, and customers like Viettel High Tech using AWS to run complex workloads, including their in-house–developed 5G core, it shows the potential.

We see a major opportunity to bring these innovations to the domestic market and eventually to the world. So that is absolutely a trend we're paying close attention to.

Looking ahead two to five years, what technologies and business models do you think will define the telco industry?

A major theme is the shift from telco to techco. Traditionally, telcos have focused heavily on cost efficiency, and the cloud is essential for enabling that, through cloud-native operations, automation, and energy-efficient architectures like the ones I mentioned earlier.

Second, as telcos increasingly serve enterprise, government, and other business-to-business (B2B) customers, they need a partner who can help them deliver. That's where solutions like AWS AI Factories, AWS Outposts, and our managed services come in, they accelerate the telcos' ability to build and scale services for their business customers.

Third, for B2C, many telcos are launching sub-brands and digital brands. AWS and our partners provide a fully vertical, cloud-native stack to support that. A good example is Mobifone in Vietnam. When they launched their youth brand, Saymee, AWS and Amdocs helped them bring it to market in record time.

And finally, telcos want a partner who truly understands their complexity. AWS is well positioned here, we have deep industry expertise, experienced leaders, and above all, we're customer-obsessed. We listen, and we deliver what the telcos need to take their services to market.

What patterns have you observed among firms that successfully transform from telco to techco?

The reality is that it has to start with a vision from the top. The telco board and leadership need a very strong conviction that they want to transform into a techco.

There are generally two approaches telcos can take. They can remain excellent providers of connectivity, which is already a fantastic business model, or they can aspire to do more.

SK Telecom in South Korea is a great example. They publicly announced years ago that they wanted to become an AI-first company, and if you look at how they've done it, it has been very consistent. They have a pyramid model outlining their strategy, they invested real capital into LLM providers like Anthropic Claude on Amazon Bedrock, they created a joint venture with multiple global operators to develop a telco-specific LLM, and they partnered with AWS to build an AI data centre in South Korea, like the one in Ulsan. We're privileged to work with operators like that.

It requires leadership commitment, strong conviction, and, most importantly, agility in the business model. That adaptability is the key recipe for success going forward. Telcos need to encourage innovation, and part of that is taking the cost out of innovation. We help make it easy for innovators to innovate by reducing those costs. If an experiment fails, no problem, the financial risk is small, and telcos love that. But if it succeeds, as we've seen with Viettel and with Reliance Jio in India, we help them scale globally.

What we see in common: a top-down vision, adaptability, the ability to experiment, partnering with AWS to keep costs low, and then being ready to scale fast, or fail fast.

Are there other factors influencing a telco's journey to becoming a techco, such as legal frameworks, investment, infrastructure, or networking?

Absolutely, these factors are essential. Telcos are highly regulated critical infrastructure in most countries, so having the right policy and regulatory framework is a game changer.

Ownership structure also matters. Even though transformation starts with leadership inside the telco, you have to consider the shareholders and what motivates them. Traditionally, telcos are viewed as safe dividend plays. The challenge for many operators is: can they shift into the “growth” part of an investor's portfolio?

The regulatory environment, policy framework, and stakeholder landscape are all critical to supporting the transformation from telco to techco.

Beyond the broader challenges facing the global telco industry, what do you see as the key challenges specifically for telcos in Vietnam right now?

I actually see this more as an opportunity rather than a challenge. If you look at it that way, and even just look around at the innovation shown at this conference, there is so much available today that can accelerate growth. When I look at the telcos in Vietnam, I see massive opportunity.

Take Amazon LEO, our satellite-based service. It can expand connectivity to underserved communities in Vietnam in partnership with local telcos. Or consider the ability to transform networks, improve operational efficiency through BSS and OSS modernisation, and completely refresh the front-of-house experience, including the work we're doing with Mobifone on digital brands.

Across the entire telco value chain, with strong leadership support and the right regulatory policies and frameworks, which Vietnam does a great job with, I believe there is a real opportunity for Vietnam's telecom industry to reach its next stage of growth. And we're very happy to be a partner in supporting that.

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