Vietnam's Dot-Com Boom

Hanoi resident Nguyen Thi Lan Phuong is an e-merchant’s dream. She likes to go shopping but has little time to fight the Vietnamese capital’s crowds and traffic, so the mother of two frequents NhomMua and Muachung, two of Vietnam’s many Groupon clones. Since discovering the sites in July, she’s bought clothes for her kids, pots and pans for her home, and facials for herself. “I sometimes buy things I don’t need, but it’s too good a deal to pass up,” she says.

Consumers like Phuong are attracting online entrepreneurs to a market they believe is on the cusp of an online revolution, one that could soon create Internet success stories on par with China’s Baidu and Tencent. “There’s a lot of interest in Vietnam’s information technology space right now,” says Deepak Natarajan, the Singapore-based director of Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s venture capital arm. “There’s huge growth potential there.” Of Vietnam’s 88 million people, about one-third are online—and most of those are young urban dwellers ready to shop. They’re “getting to the age where they are going to start consuming services online,” says Jonah Levey, chairman of Navigos Group, which owns VietnamWorks, a jobs website modeled on Monster.com. “It’s perfect for e-commerce.”