Vietnam’s digital economy has significant potential for rapid growth and the country has embraced digital transformation across various industries. The government has established a goal of achieving a 31% increase in gross merchandise value (GMV), surpassing the highest growth in the region, from US$ 23 billion in 2022 to US$ 49 billion in 2025.
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%. The contribution of the digital economy to the national GDP in 2022 accounted for about 14.26% of the total, with 7.18% contributed by the ICT digital economy.
The information and communications sector has implemented a national digital transformation scheme to develop the digital government, economy, and society. It also seeks to build strong digital technology enterprises. According to MIC’s Department of Digital Economy and Digital Society, the scale of Vietnam’s digital economy has recorded growth across several sectors, including the ICT digital economy, the platform digital economy, and the sectoral digital economy.
IT services have contributed the most to the digital economy, accounting for about 30% of the total value, followed by e-commerce (14.3%) and hardware production (12.83%). The digital content field recorded the strongest growth, up nearly 104% compared to the first quarter of 2022.
In 2022, Vietnamese digital businesses fostered strong relations with countries like the United States and Japan. Notably, the total revenue of the state-run Viettel Military Industry and Telecoms Group (Viettel) in foreign markets hit US$ 3 billion.
The MIC has developed a strategy for digital technology industry development to 2025 with a vision for 2030. As of March 2022, the ministry announced 35 national digital platforms serving digital transformation and the development of digital government, economy, and society, including 21 developed by domestic digital technology enterprises. These have contributed to facilitating state management and public services.
The government has paid attention to upgrading digital infrastructure, smartphones, broadband Internet, and cloud computing. According to the Minister of Information and Communications (MIC), 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.
In January, OpenGov Asia reported that the communication service market generated around VN 138,000 billion (US$ 5.8 billion) in 2022, an increase of 1.6% compared to 2021. Data showed that in 2022, the telecommunications industry paid roughly VN 48,000 billion (US$ 2 billion) to the state budget, and the industry saw an increase in state budget payment of 9.8% against 2021.
Profit after tax of the telecommunications industry is estimated at VN 44,500 billion (US$ 1.8 billion), up 3.8% compared to 2021. As of December 2022, the rate of mobile phone subscribers and smartphone users in Vietnam reached 75.8%. Moreover, Vietnam has 72.1 million Internet users, of which the percentage of households using fibre optic cable is estimated at 74.5%. Vietnam is currently ranked 10th in the world in terms of the percentage of applications deploying the new generation of Internet addresses Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), with the IPv6 usage rate on Vietnam’s Internet at 53%, exceeding 1% compared to its 2022 target. Furthermore, 52 out of 85 electronic portals and public services of ministries, sectors, and localities have converted IPv4 to IPv6, 2.5 times higher than in 2021.
