The country's information technology industry has set a revenue target of 17 billion USD by 2015, according to the Ministry of Information and Communications.

Software sales revenue would be 2 billion USD, hardware 12.5 billion USD and IT services 1.5 billion USD, the ministry said.

The plan to develop the country's IT industry until 2015 and 2020 has been drafted by the ministry to be submitted to the Government later this year.

Under the draft plan, the average growth rate of the country IT industry would reach 17.5 percent per year by 2015, with the hardware sector increasing 18 percent a year, software by 15 percent and digital content by 20 percent.

Exports will account for more than 60 percent of the total industry revenue.

The plan is to develop three production centres - in software, services and digital content - in HCM City, Hanoi and Da Nang.

Three strong regions of hardware and electronics will be established in the north, centre and south.

The ministry aims to develop two hardware and electronics businesses with an average revenue of over 2 billion USD and two software businesses with an average revenue of 200 million USD a year, plus two digital content businesses with a turnover of above 500 million USD a year.

Some 50,000 IT engineers would be trained and become proficient in foreign languages.

The draft plan aims to generate Made in Vietnam hardware products for the domestic market, which could be exported to international markets.

Some open source software products would be localised to be used in State agencies. The plan aims to develop a search engine in Vietnamese and three websites on procurement of goods in line with specific culture of Vietnam.

The draft plan envisages Vietnam would be among countries with the most attractive outsourcing industry and HCM City, Hanoi and Da Nang would be in a group of 10 emerging cities for outsourcing.

The plan also aims to attract over 5 billion USD in foreign investment for the information technology industry./.