Creating explosion in telecoms industry
In 2023, Viettel continued to prove that the more challenges it faces, the stronger, united, creative, and breakthrough the military business becomes. In the year, Viettel obtained impressive achievements in all fields, ranging from domestic telecoms to foreign telecoms, digital transformation, and research. According to Viettel’s Chairman and General Director Major General Tao Duc Thang, the business’ revenue reached VND 172.5 trillion, and it contributed VND 38.9 trillion to the state budget. The rate of pre-tax profit to revenue topped 25% over the last three years.
Viettel has built two national-level infrastructure systems, including the superfast broadband telecoms infrastructure with five domestic fiber optic cable routes. It also has three international landlines connecting with China, Laos, and Cambodia, and four undersea cable lines connecting with Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The group operates nearly 100,000 transmission stations, including over 55,000 4G stations that reach 98% of Vietnam’s population. The second one is digital infrastructure with the 5G network now present in all the 63 provinces and cities, the Internet-of-Things infrastructure, and 13 data centers nationwide. It has accompanied the Government during the implementation of the national digital transformation program in all the three pillars of digital government, digital economy, and digital society.
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Viettel High Technology Industries Corporation's engineers working on 5G devices |
As a leading technology enterprise in Vietnam, Viettel has invested in 10 foreign markets on three continents and ranks first in terms of the telecoms market share in seven markets. The average revenue growth rate in the last five years is 4-5 times higher than the world’s average.
Factors for development of high-tech defense industry complex
High-tech defense industry complex plays a crucial role and takes the lead in innovation systems in major powers around the world. Countries worldwide tend to develop modern defense industries. With its mission, Viettel is currently the core force in the building of a high-tech defense industry complex for the country. It has researched and produced 50 types of products for the military, helping save tens of trillions of VND.
In addition, the group has helped shape the cyber-security industry in Vietnam and is currently the biggest provider of information safety services in the country, accounting for up to 40% of the Ministry of Information and Communications-recommended information security products. Viettel possesses a contingent of globally-recognized information security experts who have identified over 400 Zero-day security vulnerabilities.
Last year, Viettel won the Pwn2Own 2023, prestigious and the largest cybersecurity attack competition; ranked first in Bugcrowd; and gained recognition from major companies, such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Oracle.
Strategies needed to build leading businesses
Over the years, Viettel has witnessed a lot of changes in its scale, experience, infrastructure, and human resources, but a constant thing is its aspiration to become a powerful global technology corporation which not only provides telecoms services, information technology solutions and digital services, delivery services, logistics, and trade, but also researches and produces high-tech industries. The business’ aspiration and actions have been inspiring others.
To help Viettel affirm its leading role, Major General Tao Duc Thang suggested the Party and State soon issue a strategy on building leading businesses for the economy and related mechanisms and policies.
Regarding the policy of developing leading businesses in Vietnam, Minister of Planning and Investment Nguyen Chi Dung said that developing businesses, including large-scale ones, is an important solution to improving production capacity and building an independent and self-reliant economy.
Over the past time, many important policies have been issued to develop large-scale enterprises that play a leading role in key industries and sectors; entrust some big and competent businesses with strategic missions.
To realize the target of building leading businesses for the economy, the Ministry of Planning and Investment proposed the Prime Minister to build a project to promote the vanguard role of national businesses in emerging sectors. Such sectors with competitive advantages as offshore wind power, ammonia, green hydrogen, steel production, electric vehicle manufacturing, telecoms and electronics industry, semiconductor industry have been recommended.
Translated by Tran Hoai