APEC forum helps SMEs enhance digital competitiveness

The one-day forum was also intended to provide SMEs and startups a platform to present their business plans and raise awareness of opportunities and challenges they may encounter in the digital economy.

It sought to help SMEs and startups unleash their full potential for sustainable, innovative, inclusive and aquality growth toward a shared future.

Le Huong, the Impact Lead of Triip’s “Save Your Ocean” Initiative, said the Online-to-Offline business model has already been applied in Vietnam, an example of which is sales on Facebook. However, it has yet been defined as an “industry”.

“I do hope that the Vietnamese Government will devise specific legal regulations in this field. And besides legal matters, I’m sure that all bussiness will adopt this model in the future because more than 40 million Vietnamese people are Facebook users, so if businesses cannot catch up with this trend, they will miss out a lot of opportunities”, Huong said.

The APEC O2O Forum was held as part of the 24th APEC Small and Medium Enterprises Ministerial Meeting (SMEMM) – which is taking place in Ho Chi Minh City from September 10-15.

Established in 1989, APEC comprises 21 economies, including Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, the US and Vietnam.