Vodafone to launch Vietnam offensive

The company has recently opened an office in Hanoi.

The news site quoted Warren Finegold, Vodafone's chief executive of global business development, as saying that the country's mobile market has high growth potential.

There's now intense speculation as to which operator Vodafone will attempt to gain a stake in. Prime candidates are Vinafone and Mobifone mainly because the Vietnamese Ministry of Post and Telematics said they're the most likely to be privatised.

There's also Viettel Telecom which is the fastest growing operator in Vietnam and uses GSM.

Vodafone won't be wanting to acquire another stake from Hutchison (HTIL) because its Vietnamese operator, HT Mobile, actually operates a cdmaOne not GSM network. The same applies to EVN Telecom.

Vietnam's population is variously estimated to be around 80 million of which between 20-25 per cent are already mobile phone users. Only around 10 per cent have access to a land line.

Vodafone isn't the only operator to be sniffing around Vietnam. Officials from Norway's Telenor, for example, attended a recent mobile phone conference there.

The INQ's previous in-depth coverage of the Vietnamese mobile market included a report that the locals might be attempting to 'ban the SIM card'. Obviously we were wrong. µ

See also
Ban the SIM