Company Visit: Quang Trung Software City (QTSC) Development Corp

This was the first of our company visits on January 14th. The QTSC was created in 2001 as a software park, the biggest of eight software parks in Vietnam, to have all the infrastructure and people co-located to serve clients and enable Vietnam to bring more IT work to the country. You can read more about them here: http://www.quangtrungsoft.com.vn/home.jsp. Below are a few snapshots of the park as we drove in and from when we sat through the presentation.






The presentation was given by Mr. Lam Long, Chief Investment and Trade Promotion, and Ms. Pham Thi Kim Phuong, Sales Manager, pictured here. It was very interesting insight into how Vietnam is trying to develop their resources and become a major option for outsourcing. It reminded me of an article I read a few months ago about how Vietnam wanted to become the next China. After visiting this park, I can see how they are going about doing that.

The park was created in order to offer a number of advantages to customers: tax breaks, office rental, one-stop service, dedicated infrastructure from fiber optic to uninterrupted phone and Internet, government support, and Human Resources. The park has strong relationships to 33 universities and colleges and their are 6 IT training centers in the QTSC. Their target outsourcing is for BPO, IT Training and Data Center. They are also partners with Cisco, Sun, and Microsoft. They have advantages for foreign investors in that they can own the land and houses, a plus from the way it's done in China where I don't think foreigners can own the land. They also offer the advantage of cheap labor since the typical salary for a software developer there is $250-$300 per month.

It's interesting to see how the government is supporting this whole effort and coordinating these efforts. I think comparing Vietnam to China, one can see that the Vietnamese government has a much easier time to lead the effort and enforce policies than the government in China. Vietnam is much smaller and doesn't have the independent provinces to contend with. Both countries have infrastructure problems with poor roads but it seems that Vietnam could more quickly catch up to China because of that. In China, the main problems expanding into the interior are the poor roads. Scott Jenkins from our Lowe's visit talked to us about that. Vietnam also has poor roads but they are starting to build major highways, one of which we road on going to the Mekong River for our tour.