Trinh Quang Chung, industry manager of Google Asia Pacific, introduces Google tools for Vietnamese enterprises at a conference in Ha Noi. — Photo dddn.com.vn

HA NOI (Biz Hub) — Vietnamese customers get used to taking advantage of free Internet-based tools in the business world. However, it is time for them to re-think this.

Nguyen Thanh Hung, vice chairman and general secretary of the Vietnam E-commerce Association, made this statement at a conference on Google tools for business operations of Vietnamese enterprises in the capital city on September 12.

Hung said that with the free tools, enterprises need not pay for them and may even save VND10. However, they should think this way: they pay VND10 and earn VND100. The benefits of paid tools might be higher than that of free tools, he added.

The conference, which the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) organised, is one of activities of the project supporting craft villages and artisans in applying e-commerce to boost their product sales and exports.

It aims to introduce Google tools to Vietnamese enterprises to enhance their production and business operations, as well as popularise and advertise their brands.

Trinh Quang Chung, industry manager of Google Asia Pacific, introduced useful tools for small and medium-sized businesses such as Google Trends, Google Global Market Finder and Google Adwords.

The first two tools are provided to users for free. With Google Trends, enterprises can get fugures on trending searches of customers and use these in crafting more responsive business plans.

For enterprises targeting international markets, Google Global Market Finder helps them evaluate export opportunities based on statistics of search on Google, key words translated on Google Translate and estimation of the competition. Google will calculate the rate of opportunities in every market and offer the competitiveness ratio and average bid prices in each market based on the information searched.

Google Adwords provides customers with four kinds of advertisements: search, display, video and mobile.

Some newspapers and companies, such as The Thao & Van Hoa (Sports & Culture) and Tuoi Tre (Youth) in Viet Nam, have joined the Google Adwords Display Network, and this allows the US-based company to posts advertisements on their websites.

According to a VCCI report issued in April 2014, Viet Nam lacks medium-sized enterprises, resulting in the low level of competitiveness of the Vietnamese business community.

In a statement released at the conference, Le Van Loi, director of VCCI's Institute of Information Technology for Business, noted that Vietnamese small and medium enterprises (SMEs) could not afford IT solution packages worth more than US$10,000 because they did not have enough financial potential to invest. He said there was a lack of IT human resources, and enterprises have to organise short courses offering basic information on IT. — VNS