VietNamNet Bridge – Instead of spending several hundreds of thousands of dong to register and maintain domain names every year, enterprises have to spend hundreds of millions of dong to buy back domain names from others.

According to Tran Minh Tan, Deputy Director of the Vietnam Internet Network Information Center (VNNIC), Vietnam now has 500,000 operational businesses, but there are only 200,000 websites.

In a report released in early 2012, the agency said that only one-fifth of 500 enterprises in Vietnam had registered for a “.vn” domain name.

According to the VNNIC, Viet Nam currently has 181,000 registered “.vn” domain names belong to 124,000 organizations and enterprises.

Dying of indifference

The southern province of Binh Duong is believed to be the locality with the highest number of businesses having registered their domain names in the country.

However, Lai Xuan Thanh, Deputy Director of the provincial Information and Communication Department, said the number is just modest. There are 15,000 operational businesses in Binh Duong, while there are only 3,200 websites using the domain name “.vn”, and 1,500 using international domain names (“.com” or “.net”).

Not only small enterprises which were not aware of the importance of registering domain names, but big Vietnamese technology groups and general corporations also once lost their international domain names. The domain name “VNPT.com” was once registered by an institution in South Korea in October 2010, while “VNPT.net” has been owned by a South Korean institution since 2001.

Most recently, local newspapers reported that BKAV, the Vietnamese leading network security firm, had to spend VND2.3 billion to buy back the bkav.com domain name from a US company, which was “agile” enough to register the domain name before.

Also according to Thanh, competent agencies are dealing with a lot of domain name disputes, including the anz.com.vn and ibm.vn which now belong to domestic and foreign individuals.

In Vietnam, Nguyen Trong Khoa has been known as a big domain name trader, who has got rich by speculating domain names and selling to the enterprises which have the demand for the domain names with the worlds relating to their brand names or enterprises’ names.

It’s still unclear how rich Khoa is, but people believe that he owns the domain names worth multi billions of dong. Khoa was wise enough to register the domain names relating to or similar to the names of the famous enterprises and then sells the domain names back to the famous enterprises.

The domain names owned by Khoa prove to be invaluable, which enterprises have to spend big money to obtain them.

Nguyen Trong Tho, Director of iNet Company in HCM City, which provides Internet solutions, said a lot of businesses had to pay a heavy price for “forgetting” or for getting late in registering domain names.

“In many cases, the domain names were sold at the prices 1,000 times higher than the initial price. If you are lucky, you can buy a domain name at VND1.5 million only. However, in other cases, you may ask to pay up $20,000,” Tho said.

Especially, domain names may become invaluable, when some enterprises buy the domain names which coincide with the names of the rivals and then connect the domain names to their addresses in order to scramble for customers.

VNNIC has granted 1.1 million domain names with “.vn” so far.

SGTT