Vietnam expected to become e-commerce powerhouse in Southeast Asia

TikTok Vietnam said the number of merchants and average sales on its app tripled last year, fueling its optimism in the country, the Nikkei Asia newspaper reported recently.

The platform of China's ByteDance eclipsed Lazada to become Vietnam's No. 2 online marketplace after Shopee, with vendors in the country earning about 1.3 billion USD in the past six months, analytics firm Metric said.

According to DataReportal, TikTok Vietnam had 67 million users early this year versus 50 million a year earlier in a country of 100 million people, compared with Facebook's 73 million users and YouTube's 63 million.

A report by the E-Commerce and Digital Economy Agency under the Ministry of Industry and Trade showed that the revenue of products sold through online business-to-consumer (B2C) retail models increased from 10.8 billion USD in 2018 to 20.5 billion USD last year. The figure is forecast to surge in the coming time and reach 650 trillion VND (26.31 billion USD) in 2024.

Meanwhile, according to a report on online retail market in 2023 released by e-commerce data platform Metric, 2.2 billion items were successfully delivered through five major e-commerce platforms in Vietnam, namely Shopee, Lazada, Tiki, Sendo, and Tiktok Shop, a surge of 52.3% over 2022.

The e-Conomy SEA 2022 report by Google, Temasek, and Brain & Company said that Vietnam was one of the countries recording highest e-commerce growth. The B2C revenue and sales volume in Vietnam are predicted to continue uptrend, with the five leading e-commerce platforms expecting to earn 310 trillion VND in 2024, representing a year-on-year growth of 35%.