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David Tran, Ho Chi Minh City Local Software Expected to Vietnam is developing a plan to increase the local software industry’s share of the domestic software market which is expected to reach US$163 million by the year 2005, an official source from Vietnam Computer Association (VCA) said.
Nguyen Quang, VCA’s chairman told NEA that Vietnam’s software industry has growth rate of about 30% per year. He also said that a software park with lower taxes and cheaper post and Internet charges will be established in Ho Chi Minh City. City authorities are working with Ho Chi Minh City National University in order to train 5,000 professional software programmers by the year 2005, Nguyen added. According to Nguyen Trong, vice chairman, VCA, there are currently only around 550 programmers working for 34 companies in the software industry. The software market in Vietnam amounted to around US$25.35 million at the end of 1998, with foreign-developed software accounting for over 69% (see Table).
Piracy Remains Problem One of the most important factors for further developing the software industry in Vietnam, according to VCA’s Trong, is a policy supporting and protecting software copyright. “The piracy rate still stands 99%, curtailing any investment in software development,” Trong observed. “Vietnam is capable of producing software for export,” the director of the Corp for Financing and Promoting Technology (FPT), Hoang Minh Chau, told a seminar on the city’s information technology development. “The US, Canada and Australia are potential markets for Vietnamese software and FPT is eyeing them. These markets are not conservative but also not easy to penetrate,” Chau said. He expected that collaboration with foreign companies will play an important role. “We cannot go global without foreign partners,” he said. Most of the foreign computer firms in Vietnam have local partners in the software business. Craig Barrett, president and CEO of Intel Corp (www.intel.com), during his visit to Vietnam, told NEA that Vietnam is able to compete with other regional countries in software and Intel is ready to help local programmers to become real players in the industry. Meanwhile, the US-based Oracle Corp (www.oracle.com) joined Vietnam’s government body dealing with the year 2000 problem in an effort to design suitable software to help governmental agencies and companies. “(In 1997) our sales in Vietnam’s software market reached US$4.5 million. It was not as much as expected, but it is encouraging,” Nguyen An Nhan, sales manager, Oracle Vietnam said. And recently, the Vietnam-Korea Switching Co (VKX) signed a cooperation agreement with the Postal Science and Technology Institute to produce software for electronic switching networks. VKX is a joint venture between Vietnam Post and Telecom Corp and LG Information and Communication (LGIC) Ltd (www.lgic.co.kr) of Korea. Pham Huu Tuan, deputy general director, VKX, said the program for developing software for electronic switchboards in Vietnam was funded by LGIC. “It trained 12 experts for Vietnam for four months, providing them with basic knowledge for switchboard development,” said Tuan.
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