Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh made the above statement in Tokyo on Wednesday morning during his meeting with leaders of several major Japanese digital enterprises.

Pham, who is in Japan for four-day official visit, said Viet Nam adopted a national digital transformation program to 2025, orientation to 2030 with dual purpose of developing digital economy, digital society, and digital government, and establishing Vietnamese digital businesses with global capacity.

This program is closely linked with other programs on green growth and climate change and the Government targets to raise the share of digital economy to GDP to 20 percent by 2025 and 30 percent by 2030.

The Southeast Asian nation has young workforce, a fast-developing information and communication technology (ICT) sector, and rising contribution of digital economy to GDP, which are conducive to digital transformation.

Going ahead, the Government will implement human resource training program to facilitate digital transformation, with the immediate goal of improving the public’s awareness of the importance of digital transformation.

To raise the nation’s ICT workforce to 2-2.5 million over the next decade from the current one million, digital transformation specialization would be added to tertiary education levels.

The Government will also invest in enhancing technological and governance capacity, and modernize the banking-finance to make it the pioneering sector in digital transformation.

According to Nguyen Huy Dung, Deputy Minister of Information and Communications, the rate of citizens using public services reached 12 percent in 20 years but the figure doubled in just one quarter during the COVID-19 pandemic time.

Eighty percent of Vietnamese 15-year-old students have been reported to learn online compared to over 60 percent on average across OECD countries, Deputy Minister Nguyen added.