Experts believe that it’s now the right time for Vietnam to join the
global IC production chain, a golden opportunity to approach to high
technologies. Insights from the Vietnam Net online newspaper.
The opportunity has come
Don Tran, Managing Director of Global Equipment Services GES, said the
demand for electronic products in Vietnam has been increasing rapidly
thanks to the increasingly high percentage of people using Internet and
their improved income. Meanwhile, enterprises tend to more utilise the
information technology and high technologies in their production and
business.
All these could be the favorable
conditions for Vietnam to develop a semiconductor IC factory it has been
striving for a long time.
According to the
official, the heavy investment in the semiconducting industry would help
reduce the imports, increase the values of domestically made
electronics and ease the reliance on imports.
“I
believe that the establishment of an IC factory in Ho Chi Minh City is a
right move, because all the necessary factors have got ready, from the
labour force, technique, transport and good development policies,” he
said.
Bettina Weiss, Vice President of SEMI, also
thinks that it’s now the right time for Vietnam to join the IC
production market. Nowadays, every person owns more than one digital
device, which means the demand for IC has been increasing rapidly, he
added
Asia- Pacific has emerged as a world’s leading
source of IC supply. China’s Taiwan, for example, now holds 13-16
percent of the market share, China 9 percent.
To Thi
Thu Huong, Deputy Director of the Information Technology Department
under the Ministry of Information and Communications, also said the
government has highlighted the IC production as one of the priority
industries.
Analysts have predicted that the Vietnamese IC market is worth 2 billion USD a year.
Knowing its own strength
As such, the matter for discussion now is what way Vietnam should follow to develop the semiconductor industry.
According to Huong, there would be many different phases of
development. The first would be the time for setting up the
infrastructure, designing IC production factories, and building up the
workforce, while the next would be the period for development which
needs the state’s support to help create the market for domestic
products.
In order to do that, it’s necessary to build up the list of the strategic products Vietnam should focus on.
Vietnam now still cannot make the products which require high
technologies, the 90 nm – 45 nm chips. Therefore, it would be better to
focus on the products which fit its capability in the immediate time.
Pham Ba Tuan from the CNS IC factory project, which is
expected to be implemented in the time to come, thinks that the 180 nm
technology proves to be most suitable to the Vietnamese current
financial capability. If it chooses the 90 nm, the price it has to pay
would be triple. Meanwhile, the 180 nm is believed to exist in the next
20 years.
He went on to say that an IC factory would
not be enough for the semiconductor industry development. In the
future, Vietnam would need to set up research and development (RD)
centres, or the design centres which would test if the products fit the
market or not before they are put into mass production.-VNA