Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan and visiting Mozambican Minister of Transport and Communications Carlos Alberto Fortes Mesquita have reached a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on the two sides’ co-operation in the field of information and communications.

The Vietnamese minister hosted a reception for the Mozambican minister in Hanoi on May 23, in which he gave the guest an overview of Vietnam’s IT and telecommunications development with revenue in the telecommunications sector in 2015 reaching US$16 billion and the IT industry nearly US$40 billion, contributing 25% to the country’s GDP.

Vietnam has built a number of IT and telecommunications enterprises reaching the regional and international scale with strong potential in terms of capital, technologies, human resources and management experience, including VNPT, Mobifone, VTC, and Viettel, operating not only in the domestic market but also in a number of foreign ones such as Laos, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Peru.

Minister Tuan also praised support from Mozambique for the joint venture between Viettel and its Mozambican partners in investing and exploiting the Movitel telecommunications network and services in the country. Currently, Movitel is the leading mobile operator in Mozambique.

The Mozambican minister said that the country has been expanding telecommunications infrastructure to remote areas coupled with enhanced quality of services. Currently, Mozambique has three mobile service providers, a fixed telephone system with 20 million mobile subscribers, 6 million 3G subscribers, 5 million broadband subscribers, and 45,000km of optical cable.

He noted that Mozambique’s telecommunications infrastructure not only serves the needs of the country, but also caters to other parts of the African continent and land-locked nations such as Malawi, Congo, and Zambia.

Mozambique is also conducting bidding on a 4G network and promoting e-government development. It has adopted the law on telecommunications to create a legal framework for the sector’s development and ensure information is accessible to all citizens across the country.

Minister Alberto Fortes Mesquita expressed his desire to co-operate with the Vietnam Ministry of Information and Communications in areas of specialised training in IT and telecommunications, and experience exchanges to effectively use mobile system and information security.

He also encouraged Vietnamese enterprises to invest in Mozambique on the basis of bilateral co-operation and public-private partnership as Viettel is a successful example of co-operation between the two countries.

Concerning co-operation between the two ministries, Minister Tuan suggested the two sides strengthen exchanges and establish dialogue channels to share experience of State management in the field of information and communication.

He added that the two sides should facilitate investment and business activities for telecommunications and IT businesses to do business in each other's countries, while actively co-operating and supporting each other in activities of international organisations in general, and specialised ones on information and communications in particular.

Source: Nhan dan