PM Dung's keynote speech at the Viet Nam ICT Summit 2013 

    Excellency Yukio Hatoyama, former Prime Minister of Japan,

    Ladies and gentlemen,

    Dear friends,

    Today, it gives me great pleasure to attend the Viet Nam ICT  Summit 2013, which addresses the main theme, “ICT – New Paradigm Shift of Development towards Comprehensive Enhancement of National Competitiveness”.

    On behalf of the Government of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, I would like to warmly welcome you all to this important event held in the capital city of Ha Noi – our hospitable and beautiful City for Peace.

    The Viet Nam ICT Summit 2013 provides us an opportunity to discuss, and share knowledge and visions, identify prevailing trends and set out directions as well as put forth solutions for promoting IC development with a view to enhancing the role of inception, only after two years, the Viet Nam ICT Summit has earned a reputation as a prestigious forum through its concrete and valuable recommendations, which help contribute largely to the State’s policy making process for the ICT field. I, therefore, highly value the initiative of the Viet Nam Software Association (VINASA) to host this Summit annually.

    This year’s Summit will focus discussions on how to promote the role of ICT in upgrading the national competitiveness, and issues related to developing the national information infrastructure, institutional reform, boosting competitiveness of the national economy, and strengthening education and training reforms. Accordingly, these issues have attracted a lot of attention from our government.

    Ladies and gentlemen,

    Viet Nam has recorded great achievements in its reform process, thus having enabled the nation to escape poverty and under-development to become a middle-income country. For such successes, Viet Nam has been praised by the international community. However, the country is now facing many difficulties and challenges. They are unstable and unsustainable economic development, low quality of growth, low effectiveness of investment, slow administrative reforms, and weak national competitiveness indexes as compared to some other countries in the region.

    Challenges confronting Viet Nam’s development are enormous. In order to overcome those challenges, Viet Nam sets the target for rapid and stable growth combined with transforming the growth model, improving quality, effectiveness and competitiveness of the economy so as to lay a foundation for Viet Nam to basically become a modern-oriented industrialized country by 2020.

    What paradigms can enable us to comprehensively enhance the national competitiveness, eliminate the danger of lagging behind other countries in development, and escape the middle-income trap as well as develop a knowledge-based economy? In this connection, I do hope that this Summit will offer us a satisfactory answer to this very question.

    Ladies and gentlemen,

    The ICT boom with mobile technology platforms, cloud computing and mega-data has helped formulate a “smart” development trend in every aspect of life, ranging from smart infrastructures, smart cities, smart healthcare, and smart education, to e-Gov and smart nation.

    Since 2000, the Vietnamese Government has introduced various policies, guidelines and appropriate solutions to “Step up ICT applications and development for industrialization and modernization”, considering IT one of the most important drivers of development, being able to make big changes to the economic, cultural, and societal life. Over the past ten years, IT has become a spear-headed economic sector with very high growth and efficiency, having explicitly accounted for about 7% of total GDP, and also spread out influence over the development of other fields and sectors in the economy and society. We have witnessed Viet Nam’s IT infrastructures and ICT services gradually expanded to be on par with countries in the region and the world. As a result, Viet Nam has been positioned deservingly on the World ICT Map. Viet Nam’s e-Government has risen to rank 4^th in Southeast Asia. Viet Nam is also listed in top 10 most attractive countries of IT outsourcing and already become the 2^nd largest IT partner of Japan. Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh City are now included in the top 10 fastest growing ITO cities.

    Relying on a young, abundant and fundamentally trained labor force, IT has become a unique comparative advantage of Viet Nam’s development process. To further promote such advantage, since 2010, the Government has implemented a project to turn Viet Nam into a strong ICT nation followed by an Action Plan on building synchronous and integrated infrastructures, applying IT to ensure modernization of all economic and social infrastructure, and building smart infrastructure for modernity. In June 2013, the Government adopted the Master Plan on simplification of administrative procedures, civil formalities and demographic data in the period of 2013-2016 with a view to basically transforming the organization and operation of State’s regulatory activities, thus creating favorable conditions for all civil transactions in all aspects of life.

    Realities show that we need to affirm that IT is the backbone connections hub and a decisive factor contributing to the successful implementation of the three strategic breakthroughs including: (i) perfecting market institutions, (ii) promoting human resources development, and (iii) developing synchronous infrastructures combined with restructuring the economy and transforming the growth model.

    Ladies and gentlemen,

    To ensure that ICT will truly become a foundation of new development paradigm for Viet Nam, the Government requests all ministries, agencies, and localities as well as the business community together with experts and researchers to take following actions:

    One, improve awareness and grasp thoroughly that IT is the foundation of a new development paradigm at all levels of government and in all socio-economic sectors, in each and every single business as well as the entire society; develop and apply ICT properly in production, business and management towards comprehensively enhancing the national competitiveness must be considered the shortest path for Viet Nam to accompany with developed countries and the times.

     Two, build a national information infrastructure system, introduce national information standards to ensure synchronous and integrated connections with focus on security and safety of national information.

    Three, strengthen research activities to master new know-how, techniques and technologies; prioritize IT human resources in each and every agency, sector, locality and the entire country.

    Four, introduce mechanisms and policies to ensure that IT applications be incorporated in all sectors, fields, programs and investment projects, … during development process.

    Five, create favorable environment for IT markets to thrive, support IT enterprises to growth in order to set strong footing in the domestic markets and upgrade competitiveness to reach out to foreign markets.

    Six, expand international cooperation, tap all resources especially that of the overseas Vietnamese community to develop national IT sector.

    Seven, consider IT development and applications an important task of the entire political system and society; hence, heads of all levels of government, organizations, and sectors must directly give order and guidance and be responsible for the efficiency of IT applications towards rapid and sustainable development.

    To materialize all above mentioned tasks, it requires strong joint efforts and commitments of all levels of government, businesses, experts and researchers.

    Ladies and gentlemen,

    Taking this opportunity, I would like to express my sincerely thanks to Excellency Yukio Hatoyama, former Japanese Prime Minister for attending this Summit. Your presence here today is of great significance as we are celebrating the 40^th anniversary of Viet Nam-Japan friendship and cooperation. At the same time, we are working towards effective cooperation between the two countries in the field of ICT. Viet Nam always hopes to receive support from Japan through cooperation programs and experience shared by Japan – a world leader in ICT.

    Ladies and gentlemen,

    On behalf of the Government of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, I would like to wish the Viet Nam ICT Summit 2013 a great success.

    May I wish you all good health, happiness and success!

Thank you very much./.