According to experts of VNPT, the US telecom market has the largest scale in the world and a high level of liberalisation. In 2006, this country had a total of 282 million phone subscribers, including 170 million mobile and 112 million fixed phone subscribers.

This country is also the place where development tendencies of the world telecom industry emerge, for example, mergers and acquisitions, developing new technology and new skill management.

These are the reasons VNPT opened its branch in the US: to update strategic information on technology and business to serve the group’s operations and integration.

Before establishing its branch in the US, VNPT had cooperated with six American partners: MCI, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint in the fields of IDD international phone services and VITC and Net Global in the areas of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

VNPT is now boosting its cooperation in Internet and communications with other American partners, such as Time Warner, Teleglobe, Fusion, Ipass and Voice2me.

Large telecom equipment producers of the US like Motorola, Lucent Technologies, Comverse, Lockheed Martin, Huges Networks, Champion, Cisco System, Corning have cooperated with some VNPT subsidiaries.

“The presence of VNPT in the US will help tighten cooperation between the group and the above companies and help the group get updated information about research and development activities of the world’s leading telecom equipment producers based in the US to serve the development of VNPT’s telecom equipment manufacturing joint venture and joint stock companies,” a VNPT leader told VietNamNet.

VNPT representatives in the US will take initiative in meeting with American partners to seek business cooperation opportunities because there are many other US companies that are strong in capital, technology but haven’t thought about investing in Vietnam yet since they lack information about the Vietnamese market.

VNPT’s plan in the US

The US telecom and communications market is very large and has a lot of potential for VNPT in both wholesale and retail. The US is now the world’s largest international telecom output wholesale market in the world.

US telecom companies operating in the telecom output wholesale field have worldwide telecom networks. With high quality and reasonable prices, American telecom developers collect telecom output from all over the world to the US before re-transmitting it to the whole world.

As a result, the US telecom market is the centre for transmitting international calls. Most leading telecom companies in the world have subsidiaries or branches in the US. For VNPT, the community of Vietnamese in the US is also a potential market in providing retail services (pre-paid phone cards, money transfer, etc.)

According to AT&T Company of the US, overseas Vietnamese in the US make a total of 25 million minutes of communications to Vietnam each month. In addition, the number of Vietnamese studying in the US is on the rise and contributes to the increase of the international telecom and Internet output between the two countries.

VNPT aims to establish a company in the US to collect transit charges from international calls to Vietnam. For example, customers can make a phone call from France to Vietnam by making a call from France to VNPT’s company in the US and the call will be then transferred to Vietnam. The phone charges, of course, must be lower than that for a direct call from France to Vietnam.

VNPT also wants to serve the community of overseas Vietnamese in the US, which numbers around 2 million.

Statistics of Vietnam show that prior to 2001, when international telecom services included only IDD phone service, the US’ AT&T, MCI and Sprint accounted for more than 50% of the total international incoming phone output of Vietnam. Since 2001, besides VNPT, other telecom companies of Vietnam like Hanoi Telecom, Viettel and Saigon Postel have cooperated with American partners to develop telecom services.

Apart from advertising its trademark in the US, VNPT’s US branch can establish relations and sign contracts with at least 7-10 new partners in the US within one year to make bridges for the group’s telecom equipment producers to access source technology of hi-tech firms in the US’ Silicon Valley.

The specific plan of VNPT’s US branch is to support some equipment producers like the Postal Equipment Plant and the Viteco Telecom Technology Joint Stock Company to join hands with US companies to set up R&D centres in California/Massachusetts; assist some feasible projects of VNPT in the US, for example listing the stock of the VMS-MobiFone company and VinaPhone, the two biggest mobile phone services in Vietnam, on the New York Stock Exchange.

Through the branch, a series of projects will be implemented in the US, for example the Vinasat satellite project, IT banking-telecom card issuance project, the undersea optical cable project, etc. In addition, the branch will find suitable American partners to recommend to VNPT’s member units like the Vietnam Telecom International (VTI), the Vietnam Data-communications Company (VDC), the VASC Software and Media Company, VinaPhone and MobiPhone.