Project

AWS commits long-term support for Vietnam’s digital transformation

Published

2 weeks ago

February 28, 2025

Amazon Web Services is launching its AWS Local Zone in Vietnam as part of its long-term investment commitment to the country’s digital transformation.

Eric Yeo, country general manager at AWS Vietnam, emphasised at a media briefing in Hanoi on February 19, “We will continue to support Vietnam’s digital transformation, expand our infrastructure, deepen our investment in skills development, and advance responsible AI adoption. Looking forward to the rest of 2025 and beyond, AWS remains committed to the long-term investment in Vietnam.”

According to Yeo, Vietnam’s digital landscape is evolving rapidly, driven by a remarkable entrepreneurial spirit. What sets Vietnam apart is its strong appetite for innovation, focus on customer experience enhancement, and eagerness to embrace cutting-edge technologies.

AWS commits long-term support for Vietnam’s digital transformation

Eric Yeo, country general manager at AWS Vietnam. Photo: AWS

He elaborated that there are three pillars of AWS support in Vietnam: comprehensive technology solutions, skills development, and infrastructure and partnership investment. The company has a full spectrum of cloud services, customisable GenAI solutions, advanced infrastructure including new Trainium-2 Ultra servers, and the upcoming AWS Local Zone in Vietnam.

AWS Local Zone is infrastructure deployment that brings AWS compute, storage, databases, and other services at the edge of the cloud closer to major residential, industrial, and IT centres, enabling customers to bring applications that require sub-10 millisecond latency closer to end users or on-premises data centres.

AWS has trained over 50,000 people in Vietnam since 2017. Success stories included TechcomBank, which upskilled more than 2,800 employees through AWS Skills Guild, reduced provisioning time by 90 per cent, and accelerated market delivery.

Regarding infrastructure and partnership investment, AWS has been expanding its ASEAN presence with new regions in Thailand (launched January 2025) and Malaysia (launched August 2024), alongside its earlier commitment to launch an AWS Local Zone in Vietnam soon. These, say AWS, are part of its commitments to meet customer demands for low latency, improved performance, and help drive productivity gains for its customers. It is also growing its partner ecosystem in Vietnam, committing to local market development, while focusing on sustainability and responsible growth here.

The company reinforces its presence in the local market with the launch of new services or recent updates to support the public sector and the business community in their digital transformation.

Hoang Hieu, senior manager of solutions architect, AWS Vietnam. Photo: AWS

“These are all part of our efforts and commitments to accompanying customers around the world as well as in Vietnam,” said Hoang Hieu, senior manager of solutions architect, AWS Vietnam. “According to forecasts, in the next one to three years, AWS will have a huge opportunity to support customers by using newer, better, faster, and more accurate tools to build and develop their applications in this AI era.”

Many businesses have had success with AWS. For example, AI Hay, a Vietnamese startup, reaches 33 million unique monthly views with 80 per cent user satisfaction.

Elsewhere, Vietnam International Bank’s ViePro, the first AWS-powered GenAI banking assistant in Vietnam, projects a 40 per cent boost in customer service productivity, 20 per cent client base growth, and significant operational cost optimisation.

“In the banking sector, successful banks like Techcombank, VPBank, VIB, and PvcomBank have started to innovate,” Hieu said, adding, “We are seeing the public sector pick up as well. In the next one to two years, those sectors will have more distinct changes in access to products.”

New capabilities

Fully aware of the next technological leaps in AI capabilities that will deliver next-generation infrastructure, make data the backbone of innovation, and change the future of work, AWS is introducing new tools and services to meet growing demand.

Image generated by Amazon Nova Canvas. Photo: AWS

For instance, the US tech giant introduced Amazon Nova, with new state-of-the-art foundation models that deliver frontier intelligence and industry-leading price performance. Amazon Nova models will be available in Amazon Bedrock, and include Amazon Nova Micro, Amazon Nova Lite, Amazon Nova Pro, Amazon Nova Premier.

“All Amazon Nova models are fast, cost-effective and have been designed to be easy to use with a customer’s systems and data. Amazon Nova Micro, Amazon Nova Lite, and Amazon Nova Pro are at least 75 per cent less expensive than the best performing models in their respective intelligence classes in Amazon Bedrock. They are also the fastest models in their respective intelligence classes in Amazon Bedrock,” said Hoang Hieu.

AWS also strengthens Amazon Bedrock with an industry-first AI safeguard, agent orchestration capability, and advanced customisation option.

With the changing future of work, AWS has announced new capabilities for Amazon Q Developer, the most capable GenAI assistant for software development, that take the undifferentiated heavy-lifting out of complex and time-consuming application migration and modernisation projects, saving customers and partners time and money.

Amazon Q Business, Amazon Q in QuickSight, and generative AI-powered experiences in third-party applications, such as Asana and Zoom, can now work from the same canonical index of enterprise data. More than 50 new actions to automate tasks across applications are generally available now.

In next-generation infrastructure and silicon, AWS has announced the general availability of AWS Trainium2-powered Amazon EC2 instances, including introducing new Trn2 UltraServers, enabling customers to train and deploy today’s latest AI models as well as future large language models and foundation models with exceptional levels of performance and cost efficiency, and unveiled next-generation Trainium3 chips were in the pipeline.

Image generated by Amazon Nova Canvas. Photo: AWS

The company has also announced new data centre components to support AI innovation and further improve energy efficiency. “Our latest data centre design improvements include simplified electrical distribution and mechanical systems that enable infrastructure availability of 99.9999 per cent. The simplified systems also reduce the potential number of racks that can be impacted by electrical issues by 89 per cent,” said Hieu. “As data is the backbone of AI innovation in the digital development era, we have unveiled the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, delivering a unified platform for data, analytics, and AI.”

According to Hieu, the new SageMaker Unified Studio makes it easy for customers to find and access data from across their organisation and bring together purpose-built AWS analytics, machine learning, and AI capabilities.

With SageMaker Catalog, administrators can define and implement consistent access policies using a single permission model with granular controls, while data workers from across teams can securely discover and access approved data and models enriched with business context metadata created by GenAI.

Meanwhile, SageMaker Lakehouse provides unified access to data stored in Amazon S3 data lakes, Redshift data warehouses, and federated data sources, reducing data silos and making it easy to query data, no matter how and where it is physically stored.

AWS also announced new Amazon SageMaker HyperPod capabilities, helping customers remove undifferentiated heavy lifting across the AI development lifecycle, saving weeks of model training time with flexible training plans, and maximise compute resource utilisation to reduce costs by up to 40 per cent.

The company enhanced capabilities for Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon S3 to support customers’ most demanding workloads. It announced new capabilities for Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB to support customers’ most demanding workloads that need to operate across multiple Regions with strong consistency, low latency, and the highest availability whether they want SQL or NoSQL.

Amazon Aurora is a cloud-native relational database that delivers all the performance and capability of a high-end commercial database, with the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of an open-source database.

AWS announced new Amazon S3 features that make S3 the first cloud object store with fully managed support for Apache Iceberg for faster analytics and the easiest way to store and manage tabular data at any scale.

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Real estate capital heading into suburban areas

Published

5 hours ago

March 12, 2025

Industrialzone.net

The shortage of affordable apartments in Ho Chi Minh City has led buyers with tight budgets to seek properties in neighbouring markets.

The real estate market in Ho Chi Minh City is facing a scarcity of land, while the cost of project development is continuing to rise. This has forced investors to carefully consider which product segments to focus on to ensure profits.

Real estate capital heading into suburban areas

Photo: baodautu.vn

Investors with land in strategic locations close to the city centre are prioritising the development of mid-range and high-end products to optimise financial outcomes.

As a result, buyers seeking affordable options are being forced to look elsewhere.

“The shortage of affordable apartments in Ho Chi Minh City has led buyers with limited finances to seek items in neighbourhoods like Binh Duong, Dong Nai, and Long An. In these areas, apartment prices hover at around $1,200-$1,600 per square metre, creating strong demand,” said Giang Huynh, head of research and S22M at Savills Ho Chi Minh City.

From another perspective, the average rental yield for apartments in Binh Duong is currently 4.7 per cent, well above the 3.7 per cent yield in Hanoi and 3.6 per cent in Ho Chi Minh City.

Dinh Minh Tuan, southern regional director of real estate trading platform Batdongsan.com.vn, shared that the high rental yield in Binh Duong is largely due to reasonably priced luxury apartments, with high rental prices and stable occupancy rates.

On average, a luxury apartment in Binh Duong can be rented for $400-$480 per month for a one-bedroom unit, and from $600-$800 for a two- to three-bedroom unit.

Meanwhile, in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi, apartments in the $1,800-$2,000 per square metre range can only be rented for around $280-$480 per month, depending on the number of bedrooms, not to mention the increasingly stiff competition in enticing tenants.

In response to the strong capital shift, real estate firms in Ho Chi Minh City’s suburban areas are accelerating legal procedures to launch new projects.

This trend reflects the investors’ agility and creates attractive opportunities for both homebuyers and investors in 2025.

Accordingly, Kim Oanh Group plans to launch a 27-hectare urban area in New Binh Duong City in the first quarter of 2025.

This will be the first project the company has collaborated on with Surbana Jurong, a partner from Singapore, under EDGE green standards.

The project features 1,656 townhouses and terraced houses, and 1,666 social apartments, priced from $28,000 per unit.

Major developer Phat Dat Real Estate Development Corporation plans to launch two major projects, Thuan An 1 and 2 in Binh Duong province, covering a total area of 4.46 ha.

The 1.8ha Thuan An 1 will provide 2,604 apartments and shophouses, while the 2.66ha Thuan An 2 will have 3,270 apartments and 16 townhouses. These projects are located on key roads.

Simultaneously, southern developer An Gia Group plans the launch of 3,000 apartments at The Gio Riverside and 76 shophouses in Di An city.

The three-hectare project, located on the provincial route DT16, offers nicely designed apartments with one to two bedrooms.

Regarding opportunities for homeownership, Phan Cong Chanh, an expert in real estate investment, noted that owning a home requires solid knowledge and time to raise financial resources.

For young people, buying a home immediately is a challenge due to limited finances.

Buyers can explore financial support packages and use leverage to shorten the time needed to purchase real estate. This needs to be accompanied by a reasonable plan to ensure long-term affordability.

“Overall, owning a home is not just a purchasing decision; it also requires a smart financial strategy. Whether choosing to buy immediately, rent, or invest in real estate in any segment, individuals must consider their financial conditions and personal plans carefully,” said Chanh.

Project

VinFast looks to long term with operational roadmap

Published

7 hours ago

March 12, 2025

Industrialzone.net

Carmaker VinFast aims to become a powerhouse in the electric vehicle market as it grapples with tougher competition abroad.

VinFast looks to long term with operational roadmap

The company wants to double EV sales when compared to last year’s figure

Potential investment from JTA Investment through an MoU between Vingroup and Qatar Investment Fund, which was unveiled last week, aligns perfectly with VinFast’s ambitious vision of scaling up production and sales in a competitive international market, the company said.

JTA Investment is exploring a potential equity investment of at least $1 billion in VinFast, the Nasdaq-listed EV manufacturer, as well as a strategic partnership aimed at supporting the company’s global expansion and technological development.

“This collaboration will unlock significant opportunities for Vingroup and its subsidiaries to drive technological, infrastructural, and sustainable economic advancement in Vietnam, while establishing a foundation for international expansion,” said Le Thi Thu Thuy, vice chairwoman of Vingroup.

Global electric vehicle (EV) competition is expected to get tougher as the demand for EVs is projected to increase further this year, but the outlook is being hindered by uncertainty surrounding tariffs and policy changes.

In 2025, S&P Global Mobility projects that 15.1 million battery EVs will be sold worldwide, a 30 per cent increase on last year. It is anticipated that 16.7 per cent of the light vehicle market will be made up of battery-based EVs.

S&P also reported that major unknowns await Chinese manufacturers BYD and Tesla in 2025 due to assumed changes to the US Inflation Reduction Act.

Last year, VinFast stated that it was delaying the opening of its North Carolina factory until 2028, which will allow the company to optimise its capital allocation and manage short-term spending more effectively, focusing more resources on supporting near-term growth targets and strengthening existing operations.

The company is expanding its strategy in India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, where EV infrastructure is developing rapidly but competition from domestic brands is limited. Experts said that in order to sustain long-term growth, it needs to compete with Chinese manufacturers and prove its competitiveness beyond its home market.

VinFast is scheduled to open factories in Subang, West Java and in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu this year. The plan to expand into India aims to seize growth opportunities in the world’s most populous nation and rapidly expanding EV market.

On February 28, VinFast and Motech Automotive Service Centres, through its franchisor and operator in the Philippines, signed an MoU on expanding the service network for VinFast’s EVs in the market. The agreement aims to meet the increasing demand for EVs among Filipino consumers, while affirming VinFast’s long-term commitment and determination to utilise green transformation across the region.

VinFast and Motech will collaborate to accredit over 60 Motech service workshops as approved VinFast service centres. In the Philippines, these service centres will have the authority to handle VinFast EV maintenance, warranties, and repairs. This year, VinFast intends to open over 100 similar service workshops throughout the Philippines.

In 2025, the company has set the ambitious target of doubling sales to around 200,000 EV globally after announcing impressive results in 2024, with 97,300 EVs sold globally, of which about 87,000 vehicles came from the domestic market.

Project

M&As in crucial sectors poised for rapid expansion

Published

9 hours ago

March 12, 2025

Industrialzone.net

Following the downturn, Vietnam’s merger and acquisition landscape is set to gain momentum in 2025, driven by spearhead industries from technology to manufacturing. Julien Curtet, partner of Index Partners, shared with VIR’s Thanh Van his insights into the overview and the prospect of the market.

How do you see Vietnam’s merger and acquisition (M&A) market affected by global market volatility?

M&As in crucial sectors poised for rapid expansion

Julien Curtet, partner of Index Partners

In 2024, global M&A activity rebounded, reaching approximately $3.5 trillion (a 15 per cent increase from 2023) with around 7,500 deals above $30 million. Corporate acquisitions rose by 12 per cent, and financial investor activity surged by 29 per cent, driven by private equity amid easing interest rates. Key sectors included technology, energy, financial services, and telecom.

Vietnam mirrored global trends with notable M&A activity in technology, energy, and industrial sectors, supported by a resilient macro and rising foreign investment.

In 2024, Vietnam’s M&A market experienced a downturn in transaction value, influenced by global economic uncertainties stemming from geopolitical tensions and currency fluctuations. However, deal volume reached around 160 transactions in the second half of 2024, marking a 25 per cent rise from the first half of 2024 and a 32 per cent jump from the second half of 2023, signalling a strong recovery trend and positive momentum for future growth. Some key deals in the second half of 2024 were Masan’s acquisition of an additional 7.1 per cent stake of VinCommerce from SK Group for $200 million, KIDO’s acquisition of Hung Vuong, Nvidia’s acquisition of VinBrain, and SK Group’s $300 million acquisition of Iscvina Manufacturing.

Mid-cap deals up to $25 million dominated Vietnam’s M&A market, accounting for just over half of total deal volume despite a 28 per cent drop in total transaction value. Mid-size transactions in the second half of the year included ADA’s acquisition of Customore and Elan’s $8.89 million acquisition of TMC Vietnam.

Could you shed light on some key drivers for the Vietnamese market in 2025 and beyond?

In 2025, it is set for strong growth, driven by key sectors such as infrastructure, technology, consumer, and manufacturing. Infrastructure will see a surge in investment, particularly in transportation and logistics, supported by government initiatives.

The technology sector is poised for rapid expansion, fuelled by favourable policies and accelerating digital transformation. Consumer spending is expected to rebound from a low base, signalling a recovery in the consumer sector.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing sector, which contributed over one-quarter of GDP in 2024, is projected to grow by 10 per cent in output, supported by new industrial zones and increased foreign investment.

The market is set to accelerate in the second half of 2025, fuelled by stable global interest rates and rising investor confidence.

Vietnam’s strong economic momentum, pro-investment policies, and booming sectors like technology, manufacturing, infrastructure, and recovery of consumer will drive deal activity, cementing its status as a key M&A hub in Southeast Asia.

How do foreign dealmakers approach strategies amidst global economic uncertainty, especially tariffs and new US policy?

Foreign dealmakers are reshaping their M&A strategies. Despite the challenges, Vietnam remains a key destination for cross-border investment, driven by its rapidly expanding technology, consumer, and manufacturing sectors.

Vietnam is rapidly advancing its technology sector, emerging as a significant player in the global digital landscape. Its commitment to technological innovation is evident through key partnerships, such as the collaboration with Nvidia to establish AI research and data centres in the country.

To further entice high-tech investments, the government offers substantial incentives, including up to four years of tax exemptions and a 50 per cent tax reduction for the subsequent nine years, as well as financial support from national sci-tech development funds.

Additionally, Vietnam’s consumer market is expected to recover in 2025, fuelled by a rising population, and increasing disposable incomes, boosting demand for goods and services. With consumer confidence rebounding and spending accelerating across sectors, Vietnam’s consumer market is regaining momentum as a vital driver of economic growth.

Vietnam is emerging as a manufacturing and logistics hub, attracting foreign investments due to its competitive labour costs (20–50 per cent lower than regional peers) and a 9.8 per cent increase in manufacturing output in 2024. An “anything but China” strategy is driving multinationals to shift production to Vietnam.

The country is also benefiting from major infrastructure projects, including the Long Thanh International Airport and deep-sea ports in Haiphong, are strengthening its logistics position, while expanding industrial areas and cross-border e-commerce fuel growth in both sectors.