VietNamNet Bridge – The domestic digital content market, estimated to be worth billions of dollars, may be out of the reach of domestic enterprises if they cannot receive the appropriate support from the state.

The market large enough

The white book on Vietnam’s information technology and communication showed that digital content is one of the industries which have the most impressive growth rates over the last 10 years. Though it only makes up 10 percent of the total revenue of the information technology industry, it has been growing rapidly by 20-40 percent per annum.

The digital content industry brought the turnover of over $1 billion in 2011, where 500-600 enterprises are operating, and employing 60,000 workers.

The latest report of the Vietnam Communications Society has pointed out that great opportunities have come to the domestic digital content industry with the fastest growth rate of the number of mobile phone and Internet subscribers in South East Asia. There are about 130 million mobile subscribers in Vietnam, including 10 million 3G subscribers.

Former Minister of Information and Communication -- Le Doan Hop affirmed that if digital content firms can take full advantage of the opportunities, they can earn tens of trillions of dong a year.

General Director of VNG -- Le Hong Minh, while highly appreciating the potentials of the digital content industry, emphasized that this is one of the main ways the Vietnamese Internet industry should follow in the time to come.

In 2012, VNG still obtained the turnover of VND2 trillion, despite the big economic difficulties, according to Minh.

According to Phan Sao Nam, President of VTC Online, Vietnam now has 34 Internet subscribers, while the figure is expected to increase to 50 million in the next 3-5 years, which he calls the “golden opportunity” for Vietnam’s digital content industry to develop.

Nguyen Hong Truong, Vice President of IDG Ventures Vietnam, agrees, saying that if Vietnam can develop the ecosystem of five elements – the participation of the government, investment funds, foreign companies, domestic companies and the support for the startups, it would be able to pocket the huge profit of tens of billions of dollars in the next years.

Unreasonable policies may block the domestic firms’ way

A report of the Ministry of Information and Communication showed that digital content firms once obtained the high growth rate of 40 percent in 2009, but the figure later dropped to 25 percent in 2010 and to 20 percent in 2011.

There have been no official statistics about the profit of the industry in 2012. However, experts have predicted the modest growth rate with the turnover of $1.5 billion, a little higher than the $1 billion in 2011.

Vietnamese digital content firms have been keen on providing content, while the other sectors which can bring the highest turnover, have been dominated by foreign firms.

Google, for example, has been dominating the searching and digital ad market. Meanwhile, Facebook has been recognized as the social network with the higher number of Vietnamese users than any other Vietnamese network.

Minh of VNG has called on the state to give timely support to help domestic digital content firms to compete with the foreign big guys.

Minh said the current policies relating to the industry development remain unclear. It takes from 6 months to 1 year to lay down a new policy, the time long enough for Facebook to increase its number of Vietnamese users from 3 million to 12 million.

NCDT