Ttntag border guard

Located at the noisy Thai Ha – Tay Son Crossroads, a luxury hotel is deserted with only several security guards at the entrance door. The project has been facing bad luck since its opening. It initially was an office building but offices were in oversupply and the investor had to shift to another business model.

The building was then redesigned to turn it into a hotel. However, it once again met ill fortune when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. Lockdowns and restricted travel policy have kept it deserted.

Even a gold-plated hotel is facing difficulties. With 360 rooms and many gold-plated items, the construction required investment capital of $100 million. The work was executed within 18 months and completed in March 2020, ready to serve the F1 tournament that was later postponed because of Covid-19. The hotel opening day was also delayed.

Other luxury hotels bearing international brands in Hanoi are in the same situation. Matthew Powell from Savills Hanoi said hotels in Hanoi had a difficult quarter because of the impact of another Covid-19 wave which decreased market capacity.

One 5-star hotel in Dong Da district was officially rated earlier this year, while two 4-star hotels in Ba Dinh and Tay Ho districts saw their star rating expire.

Meanwhile, Capella Hotel in Hoan Kiem was put into operation in Q1, but it has not been rated yet. Two 3-star hotels with 130 rooms had closed by the end of the last quarter.

Regarding supply, the entire market has 10,120 rooms in 17 5-star hotels, 17 4-star and 32 3-star hotels, up by one percent QoQ and 2 percent YoY.

The market capacity was 24 percent, down by 9 percent quarter on quarter and 20 percent year on year Meanwhile, the hotel room rate was $76 per night per room, down by 23 percent year on year.

The Covid-19 resurgence in January in Hanoi led to a reduction in hotel room occupancy rate in February and March to below 20 percent. Five-star hotels led the market in terms of revenue per available room in Q1 with $25/room/night.

Local hotels are now expecting more Vietnamese guests.

According to the Hanoi Tourism Department, after the Covid-19 outbreak was controlled, tourism points in Hanoi reopened in March. About 685,000 travelers came to Hanoi, a 180 percent month-on-month and 360 percent year on year increase.

An OAG (Official Aviation Guide) report showed that the Hanoi-HCM City air route continued to be the second busiest route in the world in March with 980,000 passengers.

Duy Khanh

The Australian Embassy in Hanoi and UNICEF on Monday unveiled a landmark A$13.5 million (US$10.5 million) package to help support the successful introduction and delivery of COVID-19 vaccine doses in Vietnam.

The Australia-UNICEF partnership will provide a unique and holistic package that will assist Vietnam across a range of areas that are vital to the successful delivery of a mass immunization program against the coronavirus, the UN body said in a press release the same day.

“Our support will help Vietnam purchase cold chain equipment to store and transport vaccine doses to where they are needed around the country, provide training courses and materials to ensure Vietnam’s health workers and officials are ready, and assist with the development of immunization plans in Vietnam’s remote provinces to ensure equitable and uniform vaccine coverage,” Robyn Mudie, Australian Ambassador to Vietnam, was quoted as saying in the press release.

Introducing a new vaccine especially for COVID-19 is a colossal task for any government with many important steps involved, said Rana Flowers, UNICEF representative in Vietnam.

UNICEF is committed to working with the Vietnamese Ministry of Health and other partners to support the introduction and roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines in Vietnam, thanks to the partnership with the Australian government, Flowers added.

“No one is safe until everyone is safe, so mass vaccination against COVID-19 is an important step to contain the pandemic, protect frontline workers who serve children and for Vietnam to reopen to the rest of the world,” she remarked.

The package will help Vietnam reach the prioritized 20 percent of its population by the end of 2022 and set the foundation necessary for immunizing the remainder as vaccines are rolled out nationwide.

Funding is drawn from Australia’s A$523.2 million ($407 million) regional Vaccine Access and Health Security Initiative, as well as from its bilateral development cooperation program with Vietnam.

In total, Australia has committed A$40 million ($31 million) over three years to support Vietnam’s vaccine procurement and delivery efforts.

On April 1, 811,200 AstraZeneca doses arrived in Vietnam as part of 30 million shots the COVAX scheme had promised to supply to the country free of charge this year.

The COVAX scheme is a facility co-led by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Gavi, the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF to accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines as well as ensure fair and equitable access for every country.

The Southeast Asian country received the first-ever shipment of 117,600 AstraZeneca shots via direct purchase from the eponymous company on February 24.

The government has vaccinated over 79,000 people since it launched the national inoculation campaign on March 8, according to the Ministry of Health.

Vietnam has registered 2,791 coronavirus patients as of Monday evening, including 2,475 recoveries and and 35 deaths, according to the health ministry’s data.

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Shawn Tan, economist from the World Bank’s Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice, said the digital economy is becoming more important, especially amid the pandemic. “Digital technologies allow businesses to better adapt to the Covid-19 shock,” he said.

Vietnam’s economic transition from a middle-income to high-income economy requires growth based on labor productivity. Digital technology will be a tool for Vietnam to speed up corporate productivity, improve adaptability and develop new businesses.

Digital technology reduces information and transaction costs and provides goods and services more efficiently, with better quality and a larger customer base and new markets.

“Vietnam has a lot of potential to use the recovery process as an inflection point towards a model of greener, inclusive and competitive growth driven by innovation,” said Shawn Tan.

A report from a World Bank survey in Vietnam shows that, in 2020, about 48% of Vietnamese businesses turned to digital platforms in response to the pandemic. This increased to 59% in October 2020. Meanwhile, only 5% of firms invested in digital solutions and 7% reorganized product combinations.

When surveying the application of technology in Vietnam, the World Bank’s indexes found that “the use of 4.0 technology in Vietnam is still in an early stage”.

Vietnam to quantify digital economy

At the seminar on digital economic measurement.

At the seminar on digital economic measurement held by the General Statistics Office of Vietnam and the World Bank last week, Nguyen Thu Huong, director general of the General Statistics Office, said that measuring and quantifying the digital economy has important implications for Vietnam.

Jaffar Al-Rikabi, World Bank economist, said that measuring the size of the digital economy faces many challenges: digital economy is a new concept with many different definitions; problems related to data quality; difficulty of measuring the consumption of digital products; the value of data investment in a modern economy is difficult to determine; measuring the sharing economy, and the challenges in understanding how the economy works when companies benefit from cross-border operations.

Experience in the world shows that the digital economy can be measured by production or the user (measured by supply – demand). When we want to know the size of the digital economy, we measure production from supply. The supply is often involved in digital economic production and trade, such as the value of investment, employment, research and development. To examine the economic impact of digitalization on the larger economy and society (e.g., productivity and wages), it is necessary to examine the application of digitalization in the digital economy.

After exchanging experiences from a number of countries around the world, officials of the General Statistics Office said that measuring the digital economy is a technical problem and very complicated, especially because identifying and collecting information is still a new thing.

In some developed countries as well as countries that have identified digital transformation as a key industry, they have invested in information gathering to make decisions as well as investment direction for digital infrastructure and digital economy for economic development.

“Vietnam is choosing the digital economy as one of the top priorities. Therefore, we would like to have advice to be able to make decisions, especially to agree on how to understand and identify the current and forward-looking digital economy,” Huong said.

Duy Vu