Australia paves potholes in Vietnam's information goat path
Australia paves potholes in Vietnam's information goat path
By Robert Templer
HANOI (AFP): Frustrated by crackling radio lines, driven to distraction by Russian telephone operators and desperate for some contact with their families, the Vietnamese community in Australia finally broke down and begged.
Eight years after answering pleas for a reliable way to call Vietnam, Australian overseas telephone company Telstra has emerged as one of the most successful telecom ventures in Asia, with plans to invest some US$ 200 million here.
Telstra, formed out of a merger between Telecom Australia and international carrier OTC, arrived in Vietnam in 1986 as a pioneer in a communist country yet to launch market reforms.
The company's only previous offshore experience had been in Malta, but the Vietnam venture has spawned a new international outlook that has taken Telstra far from its limited domestic market, said business manager Peter Allan.
"As a company providing international telecommunications we already had one foot offshore, but we decided we needed to get to a stage where we had both feet offshore and were looking back at Australia," Allan said.
It now has projects in Laos and Cambodia and is starting a scheme in Kazakhstan that was initiated before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Telstra began paving over the potholes in what was more information goat track than highway when it installed a small satellite ground station linking Vietnam to the world through the Intelsat system.
"When we were drawing up our contract for the groundstation, the Vietnamese hadn't finalized their foreign investment policy so there was some interplay as the two developed jointly," Allan said.
"We realized back then that to work in Indochina, we need people with diplomatic skills backed by our technical resources so we employed people who had worked in the Australian department of foreign affairs," he said.
Telstra's plans for an international network had two draw cards that overcame initial obstacles -- it could provide Vietnam with a turnkey communications system that would replace a handful of unreliable lines to Moscow and would bring in foreign currency.
Countries are paid a fee for each incoming call and in most cases the revenues balance out between nations, but about 90 percent of Vietnam's international telephone traffic comes from overseas, thus drawing in hefty revenues.
Telstra takes a share of the income from calls through the system it operates with Vietnam Post and Telecommunications (VNPT) and has provided the investment for a third share in an optical fiber link with Hong Kong and Thailand.
But Allan dismisses rumors that Vietnam's steep telephone charges allowed Telstra to earn back its investment in six months.
Despite 60 percent annual growth in the number of calls, Allan insists the Australian "didn't see a cent for the first five years" as most of the money has been ploughed back into the system.
A commitment to a long term investment in Vietnam's international network beyond 2000 has meant Telstra has been touted by the government here as a model of how to set up alongside a Vietnamese partner.
Telstra attributes Australia's close links with Vietnam, and a perception of that country's businesses as unthreatening, as having helped its expansion, which in turn has encouraged numerous Australian firms to follow it here.
It said that by taking a long-term view, and investing in training hundreds of Vietnamese, the company had managed to work its way to the forefront of a market full of telecom giants jostling for a share of the action.