Viet Nam: diving
in at the deep end
Philippe Martini, in Hanoi
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The Law of Generosity: once a product’s worth and indispensability are established, it becomes free or almost. Its profitability rests on the services with which it is sold. Adapted from “New Rules for the New Economy”, by Kevin Kelly, Wired magazine, United States, September 1997 |
A stone’s throw from the mausoleum of the late Ho Chi Minh is an ordinary-looking
government building with an old-fashioned entrance and a shabby hallway. It is the
headquarters of the Steering Committee of the National Programme for Information
Technology. Upstairs, things are different. There we find young computer experts,
tapping away on state-of-the-art computers.Here in the heart of Hanoi’s embassy district, the Vietnamese are charting the way ahead for their country’s computer industry. One of the things they are trying to do is come up with a “Vietnamese solution” to the millennium bug problem. It is here that part of the future is being mapped out for a sector which the country has chosen to enter at the top end of the markets, by moving into high-value-added activities.
The Vietnamese are not interested in data inputting factories. Despite approaches from several foreign investors, this kind of “low tech” work is not very common, except at times of major national surveys such as a population census.
Just as the opening-up of the economy proclaimed in 1986 was finally getting off the ground, the communist government agreed in 1993 on an ambitious “master plan” to develop information technology. The plan, which only really got going three years ago and runs until the year 2000, declares that “priority will be given to developing a software industry”.
Nguyen Kim Anh, the Moscow and Paris-educated head of the plan’s research and training centre, says developing software is the only possible way forward for a country as poor as Viet Nam, whose per capita income is no more than $300. She says that “neither the government, the private sector nor the universities have the money to invest seriously in hardware development.”
Tinkering students
The “master plan” covers all sectors–public administration, with the setting-up of departmental socio-economic databases accessible by intranet; banking and finance, with the dissemination of reliable information about the future stock exchange; defence and security; and industry itself. The government has promised to take steps to “help and encourage” public and private firms. “So far, our job has been to create an environment friendly to information technology,” says Nguyen Kim Anh. “Computerization of university administration and laboratories is now quite advanced. But elsewhere, all we have at the moment are feasibility studies.”
The country is relying primarily on its brainpower. The Vietnamese are renowned in Southeast Asia for their mathematical and computer skills. “Our students have a definite talent,” says Michel Mouyssinat, head of the French-Speaking World’s Institute for Computing (IFI), “but they enjoy tinkering more than working on complicated programmes which need teamwork.”
Nguyen Kim Anh agrees: “We’ve got quite good technicians but we don’t have enough designers of complex systems,” she says. This is why the government is trying to lure home Vietnamese computer technicians who have gone to live in the West. The authorities are also stepping up efforts to have researchers trained in Europe, North America and Australia. And along with help arriving through aid organizations like IFI, the Vietnamese education ministry is encouraging the establishment of special courses at the National University, at Ho Chi Minh City University and at Hanoi’s Polytechnic School.
Viet Nam has another advantage: its cheap but trained workforce. “A technician is recruited at a starting salary of $250 a month,” says Mouyssinat. But the market tends to push the good ones into higher-paying jobs, blunting their competitive edge in relation to other poor countries. Foreign companies grab the best technicians, who can negotiate salaries of about $800 a month after a few years.
In relation to their foreign competitors, local firms have one handicap: politically and economically-imposed restrictions on high-speed phone connexions. The government wants to keep control of the flow of information and the Internet service provider in Viet Nam is a public firm with a monopoly. This means “a line supporting a 64 K modem speed costs $3,500 a month,” says Michel Dauguet, a multimedia publisher in Hanoi who runs the Pacific Rim company. “And even at that price, we still don’t have access to all our foreign partners. This hampers our business of re-exporting software.”
