Dr Tran Ha Uyen Thi: Towards a sustainable digital future for Vietnam

Dr Tran Ha Uyen Thi is a lecturer in e-commerce at the University of Economics in Hue, in a Vietnam region that still has to catch up when it comes to digitalisation. She wants to change this and support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in their digital transformation – because the need in Vietnam is great: more than 70 per cent of the population now own internet-enabled smartphones – and the trend is rising sharply. Most Vietnamese people now do most of their shopping and other services digitally.

Companies that only offer their services in analogue form cannot keep up and are losing customers – and need support: Dr Tran Ha Uyen Thi, therefore, took a training course by the Digital Transformation Centre (DTC) in Hanoi and the Vietnamese Agency for Enterprise Development. She exchanged ideas with experts and received training materials that she can use for her courses at the university. Dr Tran Ha Uyen Thi now advises small and medium-sized enterprises on exploiting the potential of digitalisation – for example, to improve production processes and take ecological aspects into account from the outset. Small and medium-sized enterprises are an essential part of the Vietnamese economic landscape and play an important role in the country’s digital transformation.