VietNamNet Bridge – More and more information technology (IT) firms rush to make mobile applications in the context of the increasingly high number of smart phone users. Venture funds have also made heavy investment in the promising sector.

Huynh Ngoc Hung, former Director of Nava.vn, belonging to NCT Corporation, said he plans to set up a business of his own in October 2012 which would specialize in making mobile apps for online shopping

Nguyen Van Tuan, a senior executive of VC Corp, also said that the company is seeking suitable candidates for the mobile application development division, though it did not focus on the sector before.

“VC Corp plans to recruit 25 engineers, while it has found 20 only. We hope to launch an application allowing to read newspaper on smart phones, which is quite different from the apps of the same kind now available on the market,” Tuan said.

Besides, VC Corp would also focus on making apps for e-commerce and bring the company’s existing products to mobile phones, such as Muachunong.vn (groupon), Eat.vn, Rongbay.com…

In August 2012, VNG launched Zing Zalo service, an app used for multimedia messaging, seeking and connecting friends, sharing images and information for Vietnamese mobile phone users, free of charge. The product has been available on Apple Stores and Android Market already.

Nguyen Manh Hung, Chief Representative of Cyber Agent Ventures, a Japanese investment fund, said the fund has decided to make investment in two companies specializing in making mobile and web apps. The investment deal, worth 500,000 dollars, is expected to be officially made public at the end of September 2012.

Ericsson ConsumerLab, in its report made public in mid August, predicted that the number of Vietnamese people using smart phones would increase from 16 percent now to 21 percent of the total mobile phone users. The number of tablet users would also increase by three percent to five percent. Meanwhile, it is expected that 35-60 percent of mobile phone users use mobile applications in the next six months.

The world mobile app market has also witnessed a boom thanks to the increasingly high number of smart phone users. It is estimated that there are six billion mobile phone subscribers, which is triple the number of Internet users. Meanwhile, the number of smart phone users has been increasing every day.

The pioneered mobile app developers now reportedly can earn millions of dollars a year from the sector. Canalys in June 2011 predicted that the turnover from selling apps, in-app purchases and registering smart phones and tablets was 7.3 billion dollars in 2011 and would rise to 36.7 billion dollars by 2015.

Vietnamese developers can also see a potential market for international apps, having decided to join the global competition by developing apps for foreign companies. However, an executive of MeCorp has admitted that it is really difficult to make apps that can satisfy the requirements of foreign companies.

Vietnam is the place where a lot of Japanese and Indian companies set up their representatives and develop the staff of making apps for the world’s app stores, while Vietnamese service providers in Vietnam remain inexperienced enough. A few Vietnamese companies have tried to develop apps on the basis of the world’s app stores such as Color Box, MeCorp and TNT.

Color Box providers game apps such as Dalton, Trucks & Tank – the offline game apps which can be run on different operation systems. Meanwhile, MeCorp aims to build online games such as Mage Strike or Vfarm.

Compiled by C. V