HCM City (VNA) – The vigorous growth of e-commerce in recent years has created a golden opportunity for businessesto enter the export market more conveniently, heard a workshop on supporting businessesto participate in cross-border e-commerce in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 🎐Ho Chi Minh City onJune 21.

Organised by the Vietnam E-commerce and DigitalEconomy Agency under the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT), the event formed part of the ASEAN Online Sale 2023, aiming to bolster e-commerce in theregion while accelerating the implementation of ASEAN Free Trade Agreements. Le Hoang Anh, Director of the Vietnam E-commerceand Digital Economy Agency, revealed that in the 2022 reports ofGoogle, Temasek and Brain & Company focusing on six countries namely Indonesia,Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, 20 million people used online platforms for the first time in 2022, raising the total number of internet users in the region to 460million. According to Statista’s report, ASEAN is forecast toachieve a dual annual growth rate of 11.43% in the next five years, equivalentto developed countries in the world such as the US, China and Canada. Revenue from e-commerce is expected to reach 113.9 billion USD by the end of 2023 and the figure is projected to hit 175 billion USD by 2027. Oanh said that the emergence of e-commerce platforms hasalso played a vital part in the overall development of e-commerce in the ASEANregion. Shopee, a mobile-centricmarketplace where users can browse, shop and sell products, is evaluated asthe most outstanding platform, accounting for 44% of the region’s totalrevenue. With this growth, the digital economy in ASEAN is on track to grow to 1 billion USD by2030.

Squall Wang, Managing Director of UPS in Vietnam, saidthat to enter to the e-commerce market, enterprises need to reinvent or cementtheir supply chains, digitalise processes more effectively and have a better understanding about customs regulations when they bring their products to the world.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises should not worryabout investing in sophisticated technolo𒐪gies as they can take advantages of free services provided by supporting units.

In Vietnam, cross-bordere-commerce has been assessed to have great potential and it is inline with policies on the development of the digital economy set forth by the government,and at the same time, this will be an effective supplementary channel for traditional international trade to bring into playadvantages of technology, helping Vietnamese products reach more to customers worldwide./.