AT&T sees Vietnam as most promising market in ASEAN region
Communications company AT&T has said it sees the Vietnamese market as its most promising business in the ASEAN region. The company is planning to grow its business by focusing more on its customer needs this year. Vietnam presents many opportunities for businesses, thanks to its enterprising population.
AT&T is capitalizing on increased business activity there by building up the communications infrastructure, especially in areas where its customers have a large presence. It is seeing strong growth because it started with a small base two years ago. Choo Hock Lye, vice president, Sales Centre, ASEAN, AT&T, said: "I think one of the reasons why the growth was so strong was because people use our services for day to day operations."
"It's a very essential piece of their organisation. Unless they close down the office, they still have to enhance and use the services for their own infrastructure requirements."
Within the Asia-Pacific region, sales in AT&T's ASEAN market grew 18 per cent last year, slightly higher than 16 per cent in 2008. This year, AT&T has set aside US$1 billion globally to deliver more applications, services and support for customers.
Mr Choo said: "The focus of the 1 billion dollars is going to be more on the customer experience rather than the bandwidth and more nodes because we're already built out. So now, it's more enhancing the capability and the tools and processes so that we can deliver a perfect customer experience." This includes having services such as cloud-based computing, tele-presence, security services and optimizing existing networks for customers.
AT&T also disclosed that it saw a spike in interest for its tele-presence application in the last week due to the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland, but could not provide specific figures. Massive flight disruptions across Europe and elsewhere prevented many businesses from holding face-to-face meetings, forcing them to resort to telecommunications alternatives.
(Source: CNA/al)