Intel, Yahoo to join forces in Vietnam

Hanoi Times - Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker, and Yahoo! Inc. signed an agreement to jointly promote their sales and services in Vietnam, where about o­ne in four people use the Internet.“Vietnam is really amazing, with about 21 million Internet users – and of those, 60 percent access the Internet through Internet cafes,” said Debjani Ghosh, the Malaysia-based director of Intel Southeast Asia. Intel and Yahoo, owner of the second-ranked search engine, will support faster o­nline access at 12,000 out of Vietnam’s 22,000 Internet cafes by helping upgrade computers, according to Pham An Duong, Intel’s Vietnam and Indochina marketing director.Vietnam’s government is planning to raise the number of o­nline users to 35 percent of the 85 million population by 2010, Ghosh said at the signing ceremony in Ho Chi Minh City Thursday.“We see Vietnam as an emerging market with great potential for growth,” said Jason Coates, senior manager of communications at Singapore-based Yahoo Southeast Asia, “The country is very aggressive in its expectations for growth.”In 2006, Yahoo started home-page Internet sites in Vietnamese, Thai and Bahasa Indonesia and Tagalog for the Philippines.