At the sixth "Make in Vietnam" Forum, in Hanoi on January 15, FPT President Truong Gia Binh shared an inspiring story of FPT's journey to the global market.

On September 3, 1988, FPT was founded with a vision to become a new kind of institution, which can become powerful thanks to scientific and technology achievements.

Ten years later, FPT decided to enter the global market. 

"Encouraged by India’s success, we decided to open a branch in Bangalore, but we couldn’t get any order. Then we thought we needed to go to Silicon Valley in the US. We opened a branch there, but we secured no contract,” Binh recalled the first difficult days.

At the time, when funds were running out and FPT’s workers were disappointed, the Vietnamese tech firm found the ‘light at the end of tunnel’ when Ishida of Sumitomo introduced FPT to leading corporations in Japan.

FPT discovered there was no country that had IT engineers who were willing to study local languages. Their workers mostly spoke English.

Meanwhile, FPT’s workers could speak Japanese.

“We were lucky. The then Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung allowed a company to establish a university teaching Japanese language to IT engineers,” Binh recalled. “Nowadays, this is the ‘Vietnamese power’ in Japan”.

Currently, most foreign software firms in Japan are from Vietnam. Vietnam has also established a Vietnamese software association in Japan.

FPT workers have also begun learning Korean, Chinese, German, French and other foreign languages, turning language skill into a bridge that connects FPT and international markets.

Learning and speaking local languages to sell software services in local markets is the distinctive approach of Vietnam.

There are two favorable conditions ensuring the continued rapid growth of Vietnam’s software industry abroad: the 4.0 Industrial Revolution and global geopolitical events.

“Pioneering corporations have huge revenue of tens of billion of dollars from traditional sectors. Their workforce still mostly focuses on IT. Vietnam can easily shift into another sector which is still not large and still cannot bring tens of billion of dollars, but is growing very rapidly. That is digital transformation,” Binh said.

“Archimedes said that if given a lever, he could move the world. I believe that Resolution 57 is exactly Vietnam's ‘lever’ to enter an era of revival and become a powerful, prosperous country,” he added. 

Trong Dat