VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnamese e-commerce businesses, while calling for foreign investments in their businesses, keep a constant anxiety that the foreign partners would swallow them one day.
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Nguyen Hoa Binh, General Director of Peacesoft, said on Dau tu that in 2012, the
last barriers for the e-commerce development were removed. The payment, shipping
and deliveries problems have all been settled, thus making e-commerce
transactions absolutely “online.” He believes this would pave the way for the
boom of e-commerce in the near future.
However, Binh, like the owners of many other e-commerce websites, keep worrying
that one day, their businesses might be taken over by foreigners.
To date, most of the well known Vietnamese e-commerce firms, like Peacesoft, VC
Corp, VTC Online, vatgia.com or VNG, have been living with the financial support
from foreign partners. Will it happen that the foreign investors would acquire
the Vietnamese e-commerce firms which they understand very well after a long
period of cooperation?
A question may be raised that why Vietnamese e-commerce firms still open the
doors to foreign partners, if they fear that they may be taken over one day by
the foreign partners?
The answer is that Vietnamese firms now need the capital and technology support
from foreign groups.
Binh said that in the first phase of the global economic integration, it was
really a necessary thing to call for the investments from foreign powerful
groups, because this would help expand the market and improve the
competitiveness.
Peacesoft, for example, has been using the capital contributed by three foreign
partners namely Softbank, IDG Ventures and ebay.com.
“The foreign partners, who have profuse capital experiences and high
technologies, were believed to cooperate well with Vietnamese firms, which have
deep knowledge about the domestic market,” Binh said.
However, Binh, when affirming the benefits Vietnamese e-commerce firms can enjoy
with the presence of foreign partners, admitted that if businesses don’t take
precautions, they may be taken over by foreign partners, and the initially
Vietnamese owned would become non-Vietnamese later.
Agreeing with Binh, Nguyen Ngoc Diep, General Director of Vat Gia JSC, the owner
of vatgia.com, said Vietnamese e-commerce firms would be swallowed if they
depend too much on foreign partners.
Diep said foreign investors have been present in Vietnam since the very
beginning of the e-commerce market. And once the Vietnamese e-commerce firms
reach a certain development level, other foreign big guys would also jump on the
bandwagon.
Most recently, Intel Capital and Duxton have officially announced the
investments in VC Corp and VTC Online after the both reported satisfactory
business results and cemented their firm positions on the market.
Duxton has contributed 10 million dollars n cash to join forces with IDG
Ventures and VTC to become the three big shareholders of VTC Online.
Le Hong Minh, General Director of VNG, also said that Vietnamese firms have been
bearing a hard pressure from foreign partners.
Google is now considered the best information transmission channel; therefore,
when looking for the information about certain products or services, users would
not access directly to the e-commerce websites, but would use Google as a
searching engine.
Therefore, Minh said, services and product suppliers may choose Google for their
cooperation projects instead of joining hands with Vietnamese e-commerce
websites.
VnExpress has quoted a report by Visa International as saying that Vietnamese
people now have got more familiar to e-commerce. 98 percent of polled people
said they looked for information about products and services on Internet over
the last 12 months.
Compiled by Thu Uyen