VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnamese engineers have the capacity to create good computer microchips at competitive prices, but face challenges launching their products on the market because of the perception that “made-in-Vietnam” means low quality, according to Ngo Duc Hoang, MA, director of the Integrated Circuit Design Research and Education Center (ICDREC).

Hoang and his colleagues must overcome challenges, he said, to launch their “made-in-Vietnam” chips on the commercial market.

“We have to make 30 different products using the SG-8V1 chip, just to show Vietnamese businesses used to buying foreign-made products how Vietnam-made chip can be used in their products,” he said.

Hoang said Vietnam’s electronics industry has remained unchanged over the last 40 years, and is still primarily an “assembling industry”.

Vietnamese enterprises tend to buy ready-made circuit boards from other countries, mostly from China, and assemble the products in Vietnam and label them as “Vietnamese products”.

This explains why the added value of the products created in Vietnam is modest, about 3-5 percent of the products’ value.

The Vietnamese “habit” of assembling instead of manufacturing has, step by step, destroyed local creativity.

Enterprises do not create source technologies, but only focus on how to use foreign technologies and do not think that they need research and development (R&D) units of their own.

The future

“The biggest difficulties are still ahead. It will be not easy to develop the chip industry since Vietnamese favor foreign-made brands,” said Minister of Science and Technology Nguyen Quan, when asked about the commercial development of Vietnam-made chips.

Quan said that it would be not easy to persuade Vietnamese to use Vietnam-made products. “Vietnamese still do not have a high level of confidence on made-in-Vietnam products,” Quan explained. “They prefer foreign-made products, thinking that foreign-made is better than domestically made products.”

According to Hoang, the chip created by ICDREC could be use to make 500-600 products in many different fields.

However, this will happen only if Vietnamese enterprises have R&D units good enough to develop the products.

However, the R&D units at Vietnamese enterprises are weak, making it difficult for Hoang and his colleagues to find enterprises which accept ICDREC’s chips instead of foreign-made chips.

Hoang admitted that there were few enterprises that can use the chip and develop commercial products.

ICDREC has to continue working to prove that ICDREC’s chips can save enterprises big money and that Vietnam-made products are as good as foreign-made ones. They also must show that if enterprises master the technology, they would be able to adapt to different conditions.

Dat Viet