VietNamNet Bridge – The biggest Vietnamese telecom service providers are trying to expand to foreign markets, hoping to soon become multinational groups.

 
Developing foreign markets, building the brand name “Vietnam’s information technology (IT) and telecom” in the world market through the products and services with high levels of grey matter are the most important tasks that Viettel, the Vietnam Post and Telecommunication Group (VNPT) and VTC Group have been assigned by the Government, as part of the strategy to develop Vietnam into an IT power by 2020.

 

In fact, the companies have themselves highlighted expanding markets as an important task since the domestic market has become saturated. Viettel’s managers once said that outward investment will decide the development of Viettel. This is a part of its strategy to become a multinational group and create a market big enough for itself to invest in manufacturing equipments of their own brand.

 

In 2011, Viettel plans to continue to expand its operation in the markets where it has got operation licenses. It will build 4000 base stations and move ahead with investments in potential markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America with about 100 million of customers.

 

Most recently, on January 30 Viettel has got the license to investin Peru. The group plans to invest about 400 million dollar within ten years to build the network infrastructure and provide telecom services. Viettel aims to make heavy and quick investment, so that it can be listed among the three biggest telecom service providers in the markets after 2-4 years.

 

to date, Viettel has invested in five markets, including Cambodia, Laos, Haiti, Peru and Mozambique. The ambitious business plan of the telecom group is to increase the turnover from foreign markets by 2-3 times higher compared tothe domestic market by 2020.

 

Also according to Viettel, in the ranking of the global telecom service providers released by Wireless Intelligence, by the third quarter of 2010, Viettel’s network had ranked t 19th among the 784 service providers worldwide in terms of number of subscribers.

 

This means that Viettel has moved up five positions from the previous ranking. It is now one position higher than the US Sprint Nextel network. In South East Asia, Viettel has jumped from the third position to the second among the 58 service providers, just after Indonesian Telkomsel.

 

Only after ten years of joining the telecom market, Viettel has become the biggest mobile network in Vietnam, holding a huge telecom infrastructure with 42,000 base 2G and 3G base stations

 

Like Viettel, VNPT has also announced that in 2011, it will pay special attention to outward investment, focusing on providing high-profit services , such as mobile and broad band services. For example, it will implement the agreement signed with Myanmar’s YTP Company on the cooperation to develop telecom services and build a factory of telecom equipments for the local? market. It is expected that in 2011, the two sides will cooperate to develop the broad band service.

 

Besides Myanmar, VNPT will also invest in manufacturing telecom equipments to sell to Venezuela, and support VNPT Global to develop new POP in Cambodia and Germany.

 

While Viettel and VNPT focus on developing mobile and broadband services in foreign markets, VTC tries to reach out to foreign markets by distributing digital content products. In 2009, VTC Online, a subsidiary of VTC, began marching towards the international market by setting up four subsidiaries in South Korea, Cambodia, Laos and Indonesia. In 2010, VTC Online got five million dollars in turnover from the markets. The company has opened six more branches in the US, Russia, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia and China, raising the total number of subsidiaries in foreign markets to ten. The managers of VTC Online hope the company’s turnover in 2011 would reach 10 million dollar.

 

C. V