Mobile phone market attractive to foreign investors

With growth
rate of 60-70% a year, the highest in Asia,
the Vietnamese mobile phone market has become an attractive destination for
foreign telecom groups.
    Ola Ree,
chief of Norway’s Telenor
representative office in Vietnam,
said that the domestic mobile telecom market has seen spectacular progress and
his company is eager to expand its investment in the market.
    As one of
the seven largest mobile phone service providers in the world, Telenor came in Vietnam
in 2005, is planning to become a strategic partner of a Vietnamese mobile phone
provider.
    In addition
to telecom companies which have run businesses profitably in Vietnam for a long time like Ericsson, Motorola,
Siemens and Nokia, the coming of many new trademarks including Telenor of
Norway, NTT DocoMo of Japan, Vodafone of Britain and Lucent Technologies of the
US
in the country has shown foreign investors’ keen interest in this market.
    Foreign
businesses have not only developed marketing in Vietnam but also planned to
establish joint ventures and took part in the equitisation of domestic telecom
companies. According to statistics, by the end of July 2008, Vietnam has
more than 48 million mobile phone subscribers with four largest national
providers, namely MobiFone, VinaPhone, Viettel and S-Fone.