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More firms use B2B to promote exports
With good internet infrastructure and a young and active information technology sector, Viet Nam is viewed as fertile ground for the development of e-commerce, say experts.
Both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) models were expanding, with Vietnamese exporters particularly active in using online platforms to drum up new orders.
Tran Xuan Thuy, director of the business-to-business website Alibaba.com Viet Nam, told a recent seminar that "the number of enterprises participating in e-commerce transactions has been increasing fast."
The growth in new company members at Alibaba.com was averaging about 27 per cent annually, Thuy said, with over 3,500 new members joining every month.
In the past six months, Vietnamese enterprises have added an additional 16,863 new products to the site and were receiving over 14,000 inquiries per month from potential importers, he said.
Tran Dinh Toan, deputy director of OSB Investment and Technology Joint Stock Co, said that it took his company's website 10 years between 1999 to 2009 to achieve the milestone of 100,000 Vietnamese members, but that it has since attracted an additional 100,000 members within just the past three years.
"Vietnamese firms have actively participated in e-commerce websites to trade goods because costs of e-commerce were modest, accounting for just 5 per cent of business expenses, while it contributed up to 33 per cent of total revenues", reported a survey of over 2,000 businesses nationwide conducted by the Ministry of Industry and Trade last year.
Most of the firms surveyed were small- and medium-d enterprises.
The strong development of the internet in the past decade has caused many companies to change their business strategies relating to online marketing, client access and brand promotion.
According to the statistics of the Viet Nam Internet Centre, in the past 14 years since Viet Nam joined the global internet community in 1997, the number of internet users in the country has reached 30.8 million, accounting for 35.26 per cent of the total population.
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