Covid-19 has been called a ‘black swan’ as it has cast a dark shadow over the global economy. However, it has helped accelerate the development of infrastructure and technology, encouraged online working, and forced enterprises to go digital.

Hoang Viet Anh, deputy CEO of FPT, the largest Vietnamese IT group, said at the ‘From Survival to Prosperity’ forum held several days ago that about enterprises usi g the power of digital technology have developed more strongly during the Covid-19 crisis.

Product-experience digital channels such as online seminars and livestreams of car drive testing by celebrities, for example, helped Tesla reach a sales record in Q1 in the Chinese market.

The shift from traditional to digital methods has also helped expand the market and find new customers. Viet Capital Bank saw a threefold increase in the number of registrations of new accounts by August 2020 compared with January thanks to electronic customer identification.

Nguyen Trung Vu, president of CEN Group, said Covid-19 has helped enterprises discover new shopping trends and find niche markets.

While the real estate market has been paralyzed, the CEN Group has maintained a workforce of 3,000 workers and made thousands of deals each month. And while other businesses are anticipating big losses this year, the CEN Group believes that its turnover may be far higher than last year's.

As for Kangaroo, the household-use appliance manufacturer, it has begun distributing electronic and electric products through drugstore chains, and has changed its pricing strategy to target low and mid-income consumers.

According to Kangaroo chair Nguyen Thanh Phuong, cutting expenditures and skipping intermediary steps allowed the company to reserve a bigger budget to boost sales. It has ‘found opportunities in danger’ to obtain a 210 percent growth rate this year compared with 2019.

A report about the digital economy in Southeast Asia by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company in 2019 described Vietnam’s digital economy as a ‘dragon being unleashed’.

Vietnam and Indonesia are leading the region in terms of the digital economy (38 percent) with expected scale of $43 billion by 2025.

Experts believe that in the post-Covid-19 period, digital transformation will help Vietnam’s enterprises, especially small and medium sized, find a more flexible business model which will reduce expenditures and optimize resources to overcome difficulties.

In such conditions, boosting sales is one of the top priorities for businesses to offset revenue, restore working capital, and capture growth momentum.

T. An

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