Welcome to Vietnam’s ‘Silicon Valley’, where young tech entrepreneurs are driving start-up boom
Vietnamese teens rank ahead of peers in the US, Britain and Sweden in maths and science and internet access has expanded tenfold in past decade
Recent Vietnamese graduate looking for an English language teacher? There’s an app for that. Or hunting the best bowl of pho in your Hanoi neighbourhood? There’s now an app for that, too.
A decade ago such technology would likely have been developed in California’s Silicon Valley, but today those apps are being churned out by Vietnam’s start-up sector – an industry driven by local techies trained overseas but returning home to prowl for opportunities.
The sector’s growth in a young tech-hungry nation has caught the eye of foreign firms – French President Francois Hollande on Wednesday leads a cohort of businessmen to meet tech investors in Ho Chi Minh City, the communist country’s start-up hub.
The local market is large, young, fast growing, and not fully tapped
Much of the technology, which also includes popular mobile games and e-commerce software, is being produced for local consumers in Vietnam, where the median age is 30 and internet connectivity is rapidly expanding.
“The local market is large, young, fast growing, and not fully tapped,” said Eddie Thai, of 500 Start-ups, a venture with a US$10 million pot – mostly of foreign cash – to splurge on tech enterprises for Vietnamese users or made by local developers.
US-born Thai, 31, whose parents fled during the Vietnam war, belongs to a vanguard of entrepreneurs who have arrived to offer expertise in the country, where Intel and Samsung already have a foothold in the hardware industry.
“I kept getting tugged by Vietnam, I saw that the opportunity to make an impact and make money doing it were bigger the sooner I came back,” he said.
For Thai, the maths made the move a no-brainer: 90 million people, 45 million internet users, 30 million smartphone users and internet use 10 times what it was a decade ago.