Delegates pose together at the APEC Online-to-Offline (O2O) Forum in Ho Chi Minh City (Source: VNA) HCM City(VNA) – The APEC Online-to-Offline(O2O) Forum was held in Ho Chi Minh City on September 10 to foster digitalcompetitiveness and resilience of small-andmedium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and startups.
The one-day forum was also intended toprovide SMEs and startups a platform to present their business plans and raiseawareness of opportunities and challenges they may encounter in the digital economy.
It sought to help SMEs and startupsunleash their full potential for sustainable, innovative, inclusive andaquality growth toward a shared future.
Le Huong, the Impact Lead of Triip’s “SaveYour Ocean” Initiative, said theOnline-to-Offline business model has already beenapplied in Vietnam, an example ofwhich is sales on Facebook. However, it has yet been defined asan “industry”.
“I do hope that the VietnameseGovernment will devise specific legal regulations in this field. And besideslegal matters, I’m sure that all bussiness will adopt this model in the futurebecause more than 40 million Vietnamese people are Facebook users, so ifbusinesses cannot catch up with this trend, they will miss out a lot ofopportunities”, Huong said.
The APEC O2O Forum was held as part ofthe 24th APEC Small and Medium Enterprises Ministerial Meeting (SMEMM) – whichis taking place in Ho Chi Minh City from September 10-15.
Establishedin 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.-VNA
