VietNamNet Bridge – Instead of spending several hundreds of thousands of dong
to register and maintain domain names every year, enterprises have to spend
hundreds of millions of dong to buy back domain names from others.
According to Tran Minh Tan, Deputy Director of the Vietnam Internet Network
Information Center (VNNIC), Vietnam now has 500,000 operational businesses, but
there are only 200,000 websites.
In a report released in early 2012, the agency said that only one-fifth of 500
enterprises in Vietnam had registered for a “.vn” domain name.
According to the VNNIC, Viet Nam currently has 181,000 registered “.vn” domain
names belong to 124,000 organizations and enterprises.
Dying of indifference
The southern province of Binh Duong is believed to be the locality with the
highest number of businesses having registered their domain names in the
country.
However, Lai Xuan Thanh, Deputy Director of the provincial Information and
Communication Department, said the number is just modest. There are 15,000
operational businesses in Binh Duong, while there are only 3,200 websites using
the domain name “.vn”, and 1,500 using international domain names (“.com” or
“.net”).
Not only small enterprises which were not aware of the importance of registering
domain names, but big Vietnamese technology groups and general corporations also
once lost their international domain names. The domain name “VNPT.com” was once
registered by an institution in South Korea in October 2010, while “VNPT.net”
has been owned by a South Korean institution since 2001.
Most recently, local newspapers reported that BKAV, the Vietnamese leading
network security firm, had to spend VND2.3 billion to buy back the bkav.com
domain name from a US company, which was “agile” enough to register the domain
name before.
Also according to Thanh, competent agencies are dealing with a lot of domain
name disputes, including the anz.com.vn and ibm.vn which now belong to domestic
and foreign individuals.
In Vietnam, Nguyen Trong Khoa has been known as a big domain name trader, who
has got rich by speculating domain names and selling to the enterprises which
have the demand for the domain names with the worlds relating to their brand
names or enterprises’ names.
It’s still unclear how rich Khoa is, but people believe that he owns the domain
names worth multi billions of dong. Khoa was wise enough to register the domain
names relating to or similar to the names of the famous enterprises and then
sells the domain names back to the famous enterprises.
The domain names owned by Khoa prove to be invaluable, which enterprises have to
spend big money to obtain them.
Nguyen Trong Tho, Director of iNet Company in HCM City, which provides Internet
solutions, said a lot of businesses had to pay a heavy price for “forgetting” or
for getting late in registering domain names.
“In many cases, the domain names were sold at the prices 1,000 times higher than
the initial price. If you are lucky, you can buy a domain name at VND1.5 million
only. However, in other cases, you may ask to pay up $20,000,” Tho said.
Especially, domain names may become invaluable, when some enterprises buy the
domain names which coincide with the names of the rivals and then connect the
domain names to their addresses in order to scramble for customers.
VNNIC has granted 1.1 million domain names with “.vn” so far.
SGTT