With Amazon making the official move, will 2018 be the year the foreign brand booms in Vietnam?
Tuoi Tre reports that Amazon will be the next international corporation to establish a presence in Vietnam. The details of the expansion to the country will be presented during an upcoming forum that Amazon will join this month. Yesterday, a representative from the Vietnam E-Commerce Association (VECOM) told the news source that the Seattle-based online retailing giant would join a forum on the online retail sector in the country next week.
The event, titled Vietnam Online Business Forum 2018 (VOBF 2018), will take place in Hanoi and Saigon on March 14 and 16, respectively. The forum features a plethora of big names in the local tech and finance scene like NAPAS, Zalo, Grab, Mobifone, and VinaCapital, while Amazon will be one of VOBF’s key speakers.
During the conference, Amazon will share insights from its own research and analysis of Vietnam’s online commerce landscape as well as its main strategy for expansion in the country. At the moment, it’s unclear if the tech company is bringing any of its flagship services, such as Prime Now, to the country.
All we know at the moment is that, at VOBF, the company will announce the details of a program to help local small and medium-sized enterprises get their merchandise on its extensive global distribution network.
According to VECOM, Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing markets in Southeast Asia for e-commerce, having grown 25% in 2017. It’s expected that this impressive rate will continue over the next two years. Last year, online retailers saw a 35% growth in revenue, while delivery services enjoyed growth rates of between 62% and 200%.
Amazon has been angling to tap into Southeast Asia’s massive consumer base for several years now and finally made the official move in July 2017 when it entered Singapore.
“Southeast Asia is a burgeoning marketplace for us with more than 600 million consumers, growing wealth and digitization,” Asia-Pacific Director of Amazon Prime Now Henry Low said in an interview with Bloomberg at the time. “I’m super optimistic with opportunities that we have. This is day one.”
[Photo via VnExpress]
