VietNamNet Bridge - Developing the digital content industry has been a good policy, as it can take full advantage of Vietnamese workers’ competitive edge. But the industry faces issues that need to be addressed. 

The White Book published by the Ministry of Information and Communication shows that turnover from the digital content industry increased from $480 million to VND1.4 billion in 2008-2014, which means growth rate of 20 percent per annum. 

There are 4,500 businesses providing digital content products and services in the domestic market. The industry creates 70,000 jobs and productivity of $20,000 per head per annum. 

Every worker in the industry can receive $5,200 a year on average, the highest level among the three fields of information technology.

Developing the digital content industry has been a good policy, as it can take full advantage of Vietnamese workers’ competitive edge. But the industry faces issues that need to be addressed.

In the first period of development, 2003-2008, the market was dominated with digital content products on mobile networks such as ringtones, games, animations, wallpapers and the content via SMS and MMS. 

Nowadays, with strong development of internet infrastructure, digital products are getting more diverse, including PC games, mobile games, online music, educational digital content and online books.

Experts believe that Vietnam is a promising land for digital content industry for two reasons. First, the total population of over 90 million and a high percentage of young people who have high demand for digital content. Second, the boom of the telecom and internet market in the last 10 years which has created a potential market for the content industry.

By the end of June 2015, Vietnam had 38 million 3G subscribers, 8.5 million broadband subscribers and 10 million pay-TV subscribers.

However, there are many problems that need to be settled to pave the way for industry development.

The products in digital content industry have relations to many other industries, from highly creative fields, such as multimedia game development, film and digital TV, music and graphics development, to fields such as digitalization, storage and content processing.

The digital content industry is also related to distribution services, content sharing and digital processing software. One digital content product is overseen by state management agencies, including the content management agency, copyright agency and e-commerce management agency.

Analysts have commented that there are problems in implementing the government’s policies on investment incentives to digital content firms. 

While it is easy to set up incentives for the software industry, it is difficult to do this with the digital content industry because digital content products are diverse and created by different production processes.

Copyright infringement has also been cited as an obstacle to the development of the digital content industry.

Nguyen Chi