Foreign direct investment (FDI) enterprises gave a strong boost to the country’s hardware industry last year, according to Vietnam’s 2013 White Book on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) just released by the Ministry of Information and Communications.

In 2012, the ICT industry generated total revenue of US$25.5 billion, an 86% surge compared to the previous year. Of this figure, hardware and electronic sectors made over US$23 billion, rising by 103% year-on-year and accounting for 90.4% of the ICT industry’s total.

According to the ministry, the cell-phone factory of Samsung in Bac Ninh Province and the chip assembly and test plant of Intel in HCMC made the predominant contributions to the development of the hardware industry.

Exports of ICT products stood at US$22.9 billion in 2012, a 110% year-on-year increase.

The White Book also highlights pay-TV service as a segment of rapid growth as the number of pay-TV subscribers almost doubled, raising the total revenue of the sector to over US$200 million, 97% of it from cable TV.

The numbers of cable TV and Digital Terrestrial TV (DTT) subscribers were 4.4 million and 3.6 million respectively. In the cable TV sector, SCTV held a 36.26% market share, followed by VTVCab with 22.67%.

For satellite digital TV, both VSTV and VTC held a market share of over 43%, followed by AVG with 13.36%.

Concerning the phone industry development, VNPT’s landline phone service accounted for 75%, up from the 69% in 2011. That of Viettel was 23% compared to the previous year’s 22.3%.

Viettel held a 40% mobile phone service market share, followed by MobiFone with 21.4%, VinaPhone with nearly 20% and Vietnamobile 11%.

For Internet service, VNPT occupied nearly 63%, Viettel over 29% and FPT nearly 6%.

This is the fifth edition of the book released to provide information and data of the ICT industry.

Tran Nguyen Chung from the ICT department under the ministry told the media that the 2013 version of the White Book has more contents such as ratings of the local ICT industry by some international organizations.

As per a report of Tholons Group, Vietnam ranks 81st out of 161 nations in the world and fourth in the Southeast Asia in terms of ICT Development Index. For the Networked Readiness Index, the nation ranks 84th among 144 nations worldwide and fifth in Southeast Asia.

The nation also ranks eighth in the world for software outsourcing.