Vietnam records best-ever performance in digital economic development

Vietnam is viewed as a country with high potential for fast digital economic development and digital transformation trend across all fields.

It has set a target to post 31 percent growth in gross merchandise value (GMV) from US$23 billion in 2022 to US$49 billion in 2025, the highest growth in the region, according to the "e-Conomy SEA 2022" report released by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company in October.

Vietnam records best-ever performance in digital economic development (Photo: Shutterstock)

Data from the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) showed that the ICT economy's revenue reached an estimated US$148 billion in 2022, representing a year-on-year increase of 8.7 percent.

The contribution of the digital economy to national GDP in 2022 accounted for about 14.26 percent of the total, with 7.18 percent contributed by the ICT digital economy.

The information and communications sector has hosted a national digital transformation scheme with the dual goals of developing digital government, digital economy and digital society; and forming strong digital technology enterprises.

According to the MIC’s Department of Digital Economy and Digital Society, the scale of Vietnam's digital economy has recorded growth in ICT digital economy, platform digital economy, and sectoral digital economy.

IT services contributed the most to the digital economy, accounting for about 30 percent of the total value. It was followed by e-commerce (14.3 percent), and hardware production (12.83 percent). Meanwhile, the digital content field recorded the strongest growth, up nearly 104 percent compared to the first quarter of 2022.

In 2022, Vietnamese digital businesses made inroads into foreign markets, including developed countries such as the US and Japan.

Notably, the total revenue of Viettel Military Industry and Telecoms Group (Viettel) in foreign markets hit US$3 billion, and the revenue of FPT Group reached US$1 billion.

The MIC has developed a strategy for digital technology industry development to 2025 with a vision to 2030. As of March 2022, the ministry had announced 35 national digital platforms serving digital transformation and the development of digital government, digital economy, and digital society, including 21 developed by domestic digital technology enterprises such as VNPT, Viettel, CMC and FPT. These have contributed to facilitating state management and public services.

Attention has been paid to upgrading digital infrastructure, smartphones, broadband internet, and cloud computing .

According to Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung, ministries, sectors and localities have issued digital transformation programmes. As many as 500 million accounts have been registered so far for using made-in-Vietnam digital platforms - the largest-ever figure.