Military-run telecom operator Viettel Group tops the list of 500 most profitable companies, briefly called Profit500 list in Viet Nam, according to a ranking announced by Viet Nam Report Company.

The ranking is an independent assessment based on criteria of return on total assets, return on equity, return on revenue, pre-tax profit and revenue. Other criteria include the companies’ prestige and their scale of staff.

Earlier this month, Viettel also topped the list of the biggest tax payers in Viet Nam in 2016 according to another list of the 1,000 biggest tax payers in the country announced by the Ministry of Finance’s General Department of Taxation.

In the first half of the year, the group’s total revenues reached VND118 trillion (US$5.18 billion) and pre-tax profit was VND21.67 trillion, double the yearly targets.

In April, Viettel became the first telecom providers to launch the 4G service in Viet Nam nationwide. It also has the largest 4G infrastructure in Viet Nam with 36,000 base transceiver stations (BTSs), accounting for 72 per cent of the country’s total number of BTSs.

Viettel has also successfully produced and installed BTS 4G for the international market.

In the research and development, it has announced the successful development of an online charging service called vOCS – the first of its kind in Viet Nam.

The OCS is considered the most important tool for a telecom service provider because it contains all customer consumption data, business policies, products and services.

Only three other global companies – Ericsson (Sweden), Huawei and ZTE (China) – currently make OCSs.

With Viettel’s vOCS, Viet Nam became the third nation in the world to produce an OCS.

The system can serve 24 million subscribers per site – the largest number globally – while other OCSs can only serve 12 million subscribers per site. vOCS 3.0 was transferred to over 90 million subscribers in Viet Nam and five other markets. — VNS