Several Vietnamese IT and telecommunications companies that have ventured into overseas investments have achieved fruitful results in their business performance amid global economic uncertainty.

Vietnamese tech giant FPT said in an announcement released last Friday that its outbound sales of IT services hit US$1 billion, making it the first Vietnamese tech business to achieve such billion-dollar revenue from exporting software products via its subsidiary FPT Software.

Viettel Global, which takes charge of making investments abroad, under the military-run Industry and Telecommunication Group (Viettel), booked VND27.329 trillion ($1.116 billion) in consolidated revenue last year, up 21 percent year on year.

This marked the first time that Viettel Global’s consolidated sales had surpassed $1 billion.

Its business strategy to shift from traditional telecommunications services to digital services and information technology was actively deployed and achieved upbeat outcomes, making significant contributions to the company’s general performance, Nguyen Thi Hai Ly, board chairwoman of Viettel Global, said in its 2022 annual financial report.

Viettel Global maintained its positive business performance in 2023, as its net turnover in the first nine months of the year reached VND20.628 trillion ($842 million), up 17 percent versus the 2022 figure, according to its third-quarter consolidated financial statement.

Viettel Global’s profit margin stayed high at nearly 50 percent, and its gross profit margin continued an upward trend from 16 percent in 2016 to 46 percent in 2022, thanks to the company’s efforts to focus on business activities with high profit margins.

For 2023, Viettel Global set a target to earn VND28 trillion ($1.143 billion) in turnover and the same minimum amount of consolidated pre-tax profit as last year at VND3.014 trillion ($123 million).

As a result, its pre-tax profit in the first nine months this year was VND2.304 trillion ($94 million), down 40 percent against last year and equivalent to 76 percent of its whole-year target.

Despite having yet to hit a billion-dollar mark in revenue, some other Vietnamese tech companies logged rather good business performance after going global.

CMC Technology and Solution Company, one of the top five Vietnamese exporters of technology services and solutions, has established partnerships with major global partners like Samsung, Microsoft, Dell, and SAP.

CMC set a goal of becoming a global business with a billion-dollar milestone and over 10,000 employees in the 2021-25 period.

For its business performance, CMC’s consolidated sales hit VND5.389 trillion ($220 million) and its after-tax profit neared VND230 billion ($9.4 million) from January to September this year.

In 2022, its revenue and after-tax profit reached VND7.668 trillion ($313 million) and VND355 billion ($14.5 million), up 22 percent and 12 percent year on year, respectively.

To achieve such fruitful business results, these Vietnamese corporations had to make big investments in foreign markets.

In 2009, Viettel Global began offering its telecom services under the brand of Metfone in Cambodia and Unitel in Laos. 

A few years later, Viettel Global made further business expansion in Timor Leste, the Americas, Peru, Africa, and Myanmar.

However, Viettel Global is well aware that the telecom industry in the world is reaching a saturation point, resulting in increasingly limited room for further growth, while new sectors like IT, digital services, and content are thriving at a fast speed.

Therefore, Viettel Global is determined to embrace the ongoing trends by seeking new opportunities to grow its business, with a focus on digital technology and digital transformation for effective and sustainable development, Ly said.

She revealed that this Viettel subsidiary would diversify merger and acquisition (M&A) activities to ensure an adequate amount of capital and effectiveness for the company.

Regarding FPT, it has made four M&A deals and channeled money into some major tech firms in the U.S. and France, such as Intertec International, Cardinal Peak, AOSIS, and Landing AI over the past year.

FPT, which has also carried out other M&A deals with global top tech firms since 2014, said that it had expanded and elevated its partnerships with lots of big names in the field, like SAP, Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce, and Adobe, as well as joined the AI Alliance co-launched by IBM and Meta.

FPT chairman Truong Gia Binh anticipated that this tech firm would hit $1 billion in revenue from its overseas business by the end of 2023 and the figure is expected to amount to $5 billion in the next five years.

“It would be difficult for us to achieve this [business performance] if we just operated in Vietnam," he said.

Businesses should embrace the latest technologies like AI, chips, and big data to improve their competitiveness and advance further, Binh recommended.

Data from the Foreign Investment Agency, under the Ministry of Planning and Investment, showed that Vietnam’s total outbound direct investment (ODI) reached nearly $534 million last year.

The country registered 109 ODI projects that were issued new investment registration certificates, reflecting a substantial increase of 78.7 percent in volume and a 4.3 percent rise in total pledged capital compared to the figures in 2021.

The total pledged capital for these projects amounted to nearly $426 million.

As of last year, Vietnam had 1,611 valid ODI projects worth more than $21.75 billion in total, with 32 percent of them specializing in mining industries and 15.8 percent in the agro-forestry-fishery sector.

Although it was out of the list of industries with the highest outbound investments, the technology field made considerable contributions to the national economy.

A report from the Ministry of Information and Communications indicated that the IT sector recorded an estimated $148 billion in revenue last year, up 8.7 percent year on year, while the number of registered digital tech firms in 2022 rose 9.5 percent year over year at some 70,000 units.

The sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP growth and its outbound sales of hardware and electronic products also jumped 8.7 percent and 11.6 percent compared to the 2021 figures, respectively.

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