Meta Platforms Inc. (Meta), formerly Facebook, will support Vietnam to promote innovation and digital economic development, a Meta representative said at the launch of the Vietnam Innovation Challenge 2022 program held on Tuesday in Hanoi.

Rafael Frankel, Meta’s public policy director for South Asia and Southeast Asia, was speaking at the event which was organized by the Vietnamese Ministry of Planning and Investment’s National Innovation Center (NIC) in conjunction with Meta.

The program was kicked off with the theme of promoting innovation and digital transformation among Vietnamese enterprises to help boost the country’s digital economy.  

Earlier in San Francisco, the U.S., Meta and the NIC signed a memorandum of understanding to launch the program, which is a competition to seek outstanding innovative solutions from domestic and foreign organizations and individuals in order to address the major challenges to the digital transformation of Vietnam’s economy.

Frankel said at the launch ceremony that Vietnam in 2019 launched the ‘Make in Vietnam’ strategy to develop the domestic information technology industry with an aim to shift from assembly and processing to manufacture with a capacity to model product design on the spot.

Vietnam has developed the strategy with many advantages, as it ranks 44th globally on the innovation index in 2021 and is among the countries actively developing the web 3.0 generation of the Internet, as well as one of the first countries to test 5G technology, Frankel commented.

A recent report by Meta and the U.S.-based consulting firm Bain & Company, Inc. also shows that Vietnam ranks first among 11 Southeast Asian countries in terms of future technology adoption.

With Vietnam having strongly developed a digital ecosystem over the past 20 years, Meta highly appreciated the Vietnamese government’s efforts in promoting the vision of digital transformation in response to the Industrial Revolution 4.0, Frankel told the launch.  

He affirmed that Meta has actively supported the digital transformation process in Vietnam through various activities, which include giving assistance to the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 vaccination communication campaign that has reached more than 40 million people and improving digital skills for around 580,000 students, 25,000 teachers, and 64,000 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Frankel believes that such solutions will serve as catalysts to accelerate the digital transformation process and improve the competitiveness of SMEs in Vietnam.

In the period of 2018-19, Meta, then known as Facebook, supported the launch of three Developer Circles in Hanoi, Da Nang City, and Ho Chi Minh City to offer technical assistance to about 3,000 domestic programmers, Frankel said.  

Facebook also helped with the organization of two innovation challenge competitions for Vietnamese programmers in 2019 and 2020.

These contests, aimed at improving skills for young programmers, attracted more than 800 technology students across the country, he added. 

Speaking at the ceremony, Truong Gia Binh, chairman of Vietnam’s tech giant FPT, admitted that Vietnam’s economy has no longer had growth momentum based on cheap land and labor cost but it now must rely on innovations to promote national economic development.

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