If Vietnam imports most input materials needed for domestic production, it will become an outsourcing economy, officials have warned.

Seeing signs of young Asians migrating to Vietnam to work in the technology sector, NextTech president Nguyen Hoa Binh said the so called trend of ‘made-in-Vietnam technology products made by South Korea or China’ is very likely to happen in Vietnam.

Citing information that the productivity of a Singaporean worker is 14 times higher than one Vietnamese, Hoang Nam Tien, president of FPT Software, explained why Vietnam is still poor.

On a nice day in 2013, Lam Quoc Vu, full of hope, met investors to raise funds for QA Symphony, his two-year-old business. But investors in Silicon Valley took the wind out of his sail.

VietNamNet Bridge - Unable to compete with foreign manufacturers in the home market, Vietnamese mechanical engineering enterprises have to do outsourcing to survive.

Vietnamese IT firms should strive toward new technology trends such as Cloud, Mobility and Big Data rather than continue doing low-level software outsourcing, experts say.

VietNamNet Bridge - More than 70 percent of Vietnam’s total export turnover belongs to foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs), while Vietnamese enterprises still cannot join the global value chain. 

VietNamNet Bridge - For every pair of shoes worth $100, Nike makes a profit of $20, while Vietnamese workers earn $0.6. In order to have enough money to buy a pair of Nike shoes, a Vietnamese worker has to make 166 pairs of shoes.

VietNamNet Bridge - Vietnam has replaced China as the second largest partner in Japan’s software outsourcing market.

VietNamNet Bridge - As orders have moved from Vietnam to Myanmar and Laos, many Vietnamese small- and medium-sized garment companies have had to shut down.

 VietNamNet Bridge – With the Prime Minister having allowing state agencies to use outsourced services, information technology (IT) firms hope they will get more jobs in the time to come.

 VietNamNet Bridge – Under the current regulations, the firms which implement software outsourcing contracts cannot enjoy the tax incentives designed for software production firms.

Nearly one million US dollars, or over VND20 billion, would be disbursed from the state budget in a program to help software firms obtain the CMMi (capability maturity model integration) and ISO27001 certificates

Penetrating and cementing firm positions in the US market means there’s great opportunities for Vietnamese software firms to approach a lot of US giants in all business fields.

Vietnam has become the priority choice for Japanese partners when they look for the reliable partners to outsource software products. However, they keep worries about the lack of faithfulness of the workers of small software firms.