Rikkei Soft

A firm that provides digital transformation solution to a Japanese bank, Rikkei Soft, was established in 2012, targeting the global market. 

Ta Son Tung, CEO of Rikkei, was once a student at the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST). He studied in Japan for three years with a scholarship granted by the Japanese government.

In 2016, Rikkei Soft set up a legal entity in Japan, Rikkei Japan, and in 2020, a branch in Osaka. Now Rikkei Soft has four branches in Vietnam and four in Japan (Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka and Nagoya).

As of May 2023, Rikkei Soft had had over 1,600 workers and 100 percent of them use foreign languages fluently. 

Regarding its markets, Rikkei Soft has over 500 corporate customers with more than 1,000 projects. Previously, 100 percent of Rikkei Soft’s revenue came from the Japanese market, but the figure is now 80 percent. The other 20 percent comes from the US, Singapore, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand.

With the motto ‘Go Global from Japan’, Rikkei Japan in 2023 plans to set up one more branch in Thailand, and after that, in South Korea and other countries. 

The ecosystem of Rikkei Soft comprises many member companies, products and solutions, including Rikkei Digital (specializing in digital transformation and Southeast Asia market), and Rikkei Academy (teaching Japanese language and IT to former students and interns, so that they can return to Japan or stay in Japan as IT engineers).  

Meanwhile, Rikkei Incubator funds startups, Rikkei AI provides solutions using AI, and Rikkei IT Service provides software services.

One of the strengths of Rikkei Soft is providing digital transformation solutions to Japanese banks. Many Japanese banking systems were established a long time ago with the ‘classic’ language of Cobol which has become outdated. Bank data are large and old systems are becoming overloaded. The banks now have demand to transfer data to the cloud.

Rikkei has built up a team with members who are good at both IT and banking operations. The workers read and probe each command of the old Cobol program to re-write documents, then transfer this to the program development team to transfer to the cloud.

Previously, this work was undertaken by Chinese firms. However, Chinese have left the Japanese market and returned to China because they can be paid better in China.

In 2023, the number of Vietnamese in Japan for the first time exceeded the number of Chinese (470,000 vs 440,000). Japan now can be the destination for Vietnamese tech firms to come to fill the gap left by the Chinese.

FPT Japan

FPT Japan was established in 2005. Compared with local companies, FPT Japan has great advantages in competitive incomes, and support policies for workers and their relatives. As many Vietnamese engineers go to Japan to work on site, FPT Japan leases dorms with 600 rooms for newcomers.

In early 2023, Great Place to Work Japan recognized FPT Japan as one of the top 100 best workplaces. In addition to preparing resources for big projects, FPT Japan also runs special policies such as ‘Go Japan’, ‘Enjoy Japan’ and ‘Taishokukin’ (unemployment allowance) to attract talents.

In April 2023, FPT Japan opened a training center for its workers in Tokyo, capable of training 70 IT learners. Weekend classes at the company attract 250 workers.

In addition to the internal training system, FPT Japan’s school now teaches the Japanese language to 150 Vietnamese students to prepare them to attend classes at Japanese vocational schools.

A report found that there are 300,000 Vietnamese trained in different occupations in Japan, and many of them have had to return to Vietnam after finishing training courses because they can’t find jobs.

Regarding the ‘know-how’ of FPT, experts said it is "using Japanese people to approach the Japanese market". In 2020, FPT Consulting was established with the majority of workers being Japanese.

Second, the company decided to shift from offshore to nearshore and bestshore. In the past, FPT set up offices in Japan, took orders and implemented orders in Vietnam under the offshore form. But it has turned the offices into branches and followed the nearshore instead of offshore approach.

In 2017, FPT Japan set up its first nearshore center, FPT Okinawa & R&D, which has been renamed FPT Near Shore.

FPT wants to become a global company competing with the world’s leading group. It wants to obtain revenue of $1 billion and 5,000 workers by 2027.

Nguyen Thanh Tuyen

(Deputy Director of the Department of Information and Communications Technology Industry

Ministry of Information and Communications)