The Effect of Covid-19
The Vietnamese market is currently facing challenges due to the pandemic. Certain factories have been shut down, and exports/imports are also affected. This is more pronounced in the southern part of the country, while the north is doing better. To mitigate this, the government is pouring money into sectors such as medical, electrical goods, and construction. There are also increasing trends were tech companies are investing into cloud-based solutions, online meeting software, and remote teaching to meet demands.
Current Projects
Innodisk is focused on IPC clients that create devices aimed at automation and factories. The SATADOM® is also popular for both surveillance and server applications. A re-occurring theme when communicating with potential customer is the unfamiliarity with industrial-grade memory. The key in solving this is educating the market on our solutions and the benefits of stability and rigid quality control.
Smart City
The main markets for smart cities are surveillance and ERPs. Surveillance is mainly set up as a centralized system that handles all functions such as numbers plate, vehicle, and facial recognition. For ERPs, the system integrator is looking to collect more information from factories (scale, sensors, machines such as SCADAR systems), and standard office functions (imports, finance, products) by using tool like SAP and ODOO.
AI
Innodisk is known among certain sectors of the industry. Here the opportunities are great as the customers like to co-work due to the potential and Innodisk’s quality devices. For data security applications, our devices are used to encode/decode data in traffic networks as the customer wants to avoid data loss, and require high-end flash/dram for this field.
Factories and automation is another growing market where customers demand stringent tests, which in turn need requires flash to save/clear OS data – a very taxing process for commercial-grade memory, and much better handled by an industrial-grade solution.
There are several target markets for the future: security, automation, telecom, AI, and cloud. To access the security market, we are targeting radar and telecom applications as these customers require high-performance devices. In the automation field we are working with IPC distributors, and are approaching larger market players such as prominent chipmakers as well as food and beverage companies.
With the implementation of 5G, we are also involved in certain R&D ventures into the Telecom field. And tying everything up is AI where we are striving towards autonomous vehicles integration, AI-powered cameras, AI for smart city together with some of the big actors in the market. The key is in showing them the advantages of our memory solutions when it comes to the cost-benefit ratio.
Although the market outlook in Vietnam is bright, there are still some challenges:
- Importing in bulk: Most distributor and system integrators like to import in bulk to avoid unnecessary paperwork and to secure supply
- Industrial mindset: Some customers do not understand the industrial mindset, they use low-cost commercial-grade products
- Pandemic: Most projects are currently pending, and customers are avoiding large investments, but the government have a lot of projects and intent to open new ones that focus on AI, IoT, telecom (5G), cloud, and smart city
The Vietnamese market is swinging back from a downturn that has not just affected them, but the whole globe. The potential for growth in a wide variety of sectors is clear and Innodisk is ready to play the role of the leading industrial-grade memory provider.
