Thanks to the application of IT advances, Vietnam has exported software products to various prestigious markets, of this exports to Japan has reported an average growth of 40-50% a year (ranking second to the North American market.)
Many Vietnamese software products have had a large proportion of revenue from the Japanese market. These include FPT (56%), Luvina, NCS, Vinh Nam (100%).
Famous Japanese software companies, NEC, Hitachi and Soft have also invested and set up their branches in Vietnam. Hitachi and Soft currently have one fourth of their total global outsourced software carried out in Vietnam.
One of the reasons for success is that two sides have established bilateral relations with great contributions from the Vietnam Software Association (VINASA) and VINASA Japan IT Co-operation Club (VJC). VJC currently has 50 members including FPT, CMC, Luvina, NCS... from Vietnam and NEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi,...from Japan.
The two sides have also co-operated in inspection of software product and business process outsourcing (BPO). Japan has helped trained engineers as well as sent voluntary experts to work at VINASA.
However, the results were yet to be satisfactory because most of the Vietnamese software companies are small-scaled and even more, they lack a linkage between them. The software staff is both weak and insufficient and there is a difference in trading culture.
Therefore, "The Japan's Information Day" held annually in Vietnam has been considered to be an important event that attracts the attention of enterprises, software associations and IT leaders of both countries.
This year, the event was held on the occasion of the 35th founding anniversary of the Vietnam-Japan diplomatic relations. Participating in the event were 30 Japanese software companies.
During the event, seminars and exchanges on four themes: environment and policies, enterprises, human resources and technology and co-operation to boost Vietnam-Japan IT development.
At these activities, enterprises of the two countries exchanged experiences to boost the close bilateral co-operation and expressed their hope that the governments of the two countries to soon sign a programme to support software companies of Vietnam and Japan, develop the human resources for Vietnam's IT sector and build a website and portal to promote co-operation between software companies of Vietnam and Japan.
Japan's Information Day 2008 has ended and it needs time for ideas to become reality. However, it is impressive that IT and software experts of the two countries have had a common voice in bringing Vietnam-Japan software technological co-operation to a new height so as to increase software exports from Vietnam to Japan, turning Japan into Vietnam's biggest importer of Vietnam software products.
Source: Nhan Dan/VNN