Small Vietnamese mobile network providers, such as EVNTelecom and S-Fone, are facing hardship in seeking foreign strategic investors to sell their shares, Dau Tu newspaper reported.

Since Vietnamese market has been matured in terms of subscriptions with around 112 million ones as of August 2011, there is likely no remaining room for those small operators to grow.

Even a big domestic telecom firm, FPT Group, has withdrawn its decision to purchase up to 60 percent of total stake in EVNTelecom, although the group had already deposited over VND700 billion for this deal.

At present, FPT is not sure when to take back the deposit.

EVNTelecom has recently sought government's approval for the plan of offering 12 percent of stake to the Vietnam Multimedia Corp (VTC).

The situation for S-Fone is nearly the same.

Although it has already got approval for changing the business model into a joint venture and resolved the problems with South Korean partner of SK Telecom, there haven't been any investors showing interest in making investment with S-Fone.

S-Fone Joint Venture has been established on the basic of capital contribution from Saigon Post and Telecommunication Services Joint Stock Co (SPT) (80 percent) and SK Telecom (20 percent).

Since SK Telecom has withdrawn capital in the joint venture by transferring holdings to SPT within a fixed period, S-Fone is still looking for potential partners, both foreign and domestic, who show true interest in making business with the mobile network provider.

Smartphone and feature phone sales in Vietnam increased by 27 percent in unit shipment and 21 percent in value in the first seven months of 2011, despite cutbacks in general consumer spending on rising inflation, newswire zdnetasia.com cited a recent report released by GfK Asia.

GfK saw declined sales across various market segments it tracked including IT, home appliances and consumer electronics, but the mobile phone sector remained unaffected and instead, enjoyed continued growth, said Van Tran Khoa, general manager of GfK Vietnam.

Even as prices of basic living necessities such as food and fuel increased, Vietnamese consumers continued to splurge on the latest phone technology, the analyst said.

The report noted that the average price of a smartphone was at $300, five times the price of a feature phone which averaged at $66.

Overall, 1 in 10 mobile phones purchased in 2011 was a smartphone and its share in the overall market grew by 10 percent to 34 percent.

The smartphone category propelled the mobile industry's good performance even though feature phones also enjoyed the positive growth.

Smartphone unit sales grew over 73 percent this year over the same period last year, boosting the value of this market segment to nearly $280 million, up 67 percent from last year's $168 million.

Although the feature phone segment continued to expand, the growth momentum slowed to 24 percent in unit shipment and 6 percent in value compared to 34 percent and 7 percent, respectively, the year before.

(Source: Vietnamnet)