Vice Chairman of the provincial People's Committee Nguyen Huu Lap was speaking at the seminar titled ‘E-commerce – A breakthrough solution for businesses’, held in the southern province of Ben Tre on August 20.

The event, attended by provincial authorities and more than 300 enterprises in the Mekong Delta region, aimed to share and update information on the trend of e-commerce development in the country. It created favourable conditions for enterprises of all economic sectors to approach e-commerce solution providers, gradually exploit the benefits of e-commerce, boosting brand promotion and increasing business efficiency.

Thanks to e-commerce, consumers can access an unlimited source of diversified brands and products, Lap told the seminar, which was co-organised by Ben Tre province’s Department of Industry and Trade, the Vietnam E-Commerce Association and the Department of E-Commerce and Digital Economy under the Ministry of Industry and Trade.

However, at present, many businesses had not grasped and fully exploited the advantages of e-commerce but still focused on traditional sales channels, Lap said.

At the seminar, experts said that the development of science and technology and drastic changes in production methods, management, services and trade brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution required businesses to innovate thinking, build online business models with abundant supply systems to enter the market, meeting the requirements of distributors and importers.

Nguyen Ngoc Dung, Vice Chairman of the Vietnam E-Commerce Association (VECOM) said that in 2018, Vietnam witnessed strong growth of e-commerce with an average rate of over 30 percent. E-commerce sales posted over 4 billion USD in 2015 and reached 7.8 billion USD in 2018. They are expected to hit 13 billion USD by 2020.

According to Deputy Director of the Department of Industry and Trade of Ben Tre province Nguyen Van Niem, provincial leaders pay special attention and create favourable conditions for enterprises to develop e-commerce. Currently, the number of businesses applying e-commerce to business activities and trade is increasing.

Notably, since April, the proinvincial Department of Industry and Trade has cooperated with the Vietnam E-Commerce Association and Lazada Group to implement the program "Online Day of Ben Tre Coconut Village". So far, 16 enterprises, cooperatives and coconut villages in Ben Tre are participating in the programme, selling 1,877 coconut products of different kinds.

Niem said that at present, the department was planning to build an e-commerce platform to sell specialties of the province to help local businesses promote and sell goods.

In the future, it will continue to support local businesses in developing e-commerce such as organising training courses, coordinating with Lazada to promote local products, encourage businesses to participate in sales on lazada.vn, building free websites for businesses, develop an online brand set for key products of Ben Tre province, he added.