The application economy in Vietnam is growing very quickly. According to statistics from the Ministry of Information and Communications, it is estimated that in the last 6 months, Vietnam continues to rank 11th globally in the number of mobile application downloads and 31st globally in terms of payment revenue via applications.

Although the downloading of free applications decreased, however, Vietnam recorded an 11% increase in the download trend of paid applications compared to the same period 6 months ago.

Currently, Vietnam has 7 applications with over 10 million regularly active user accounts, 10 applications with 5-10 million user accounts and 43 applications with 1-5 million regular user accounts.

Notably, the latest data from Data.ai shows that, although not in the top group in terms of revenue, Vietnam is currently ranked 6th in the world in terms of growth in time spent on applications. In 2023, Vietnamese people will spend 11.8 billion more hours using applications compared to 2022 (equivalent to an increase of 12.8%), with Android phones alone.

In a recent sharing with VietNamNet, a representative of Yandex, Russia's largest technology company, said Southeast Asia is a potential market for businesses to develop and seek revenue from applications.

With high smartphone penetration rates in this region, app publishers have a lot of growth opportunities. In particular, Vietnam is considered a fertile land for application businesses, with the second highest number of application downloads in Southeast Asia and a large proportion of mobile users.

According to Ms. Nana Phan - in charge of strategic relations for Yandex Ads in Southeast Asia, the mobile application business in Vietnam is growing strongly. Revenue from in-app advertising is expected to account for more than half of the revenue of application development businesses.

"With my experience, I am completely confident that Vietnam is one of the leading markets for mobile advertising in Asia. Application market trends in Vietnam are also quite in sync with the global market", this expert shared.

Not only conquering the domestic market, with relatively high product quality, Vietnamese application developers are considered capable of attracting foreign users.

There have been many successful application publishers from Vietnam in the international market, especially in the game publishing segment such as Falcon Studio, Wolffun, Amanote, Funtap, iKame,... Therefore, the potential for developing the application economy in Vietnam is very large.

From experience in exploiting the online advertising market in Russia and many Eastern European countries, Yandex representatives said that Vietnamese application developers are fully capable of conquering the Russian-speaking user base.

"Vietnamese applications are known to Russians mainly in the field of games, utility applications such as photo editing, applications for travel and entertainment purposes", said a representative of the Russian technology company.

In fact, this unit has had many successful collaborations with Vietnamese game publishers. In particular, IndieZ is one of the typical cases when this developer's game "Traffic Jam 3D" currently has a solid foothold in the Russian market and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS, including 9 countries separated from the Soviet Union).

Sharing their "go global" experience, a representative of a technology company from Russia said that, in addition to charging app usage fees, Vietnamese developers should link with online advertising networks, units that understand the mechanisms of increasing revenue, the needs of local users and are familiar with local legal corridors.