Software companies which are believed to make up 50% of the success of the projects on developing ICT applications for state agencies, complain that they are encountering many difficulties due to unreasonable policies.

Successful tenderers could turn into loss-making businesses

Under the current regulations, the investment process of an information technology (IT) application project must experience three stages: investment preparation, investment implementation and investment completion. The problem is that the projects always last many years, thus causing additional expenses to enterprises. In the context of the high inflation, the prices of goods increase steadily, while the bank loan interest rates also increase.

“It is enterprises which have to bear the additional expenses,” said Nguyen Trung Chinh, General Director of CMC Technology Group.

He went on to say that enterprises always have to “run after the projects” to update the technical configurations, because it always takes enterprises a long time to wait for the government agencies to approve the projects, and the waiting time is always long enough for technology to make big leaps.

Ngo Vi Dong, Chair of HPT Company, also said that with the complicated bidding procedures, successful tenderers could take loss in the projects, because a lot of changes in the prices of goods and the dong/dollar exchange rates occur during the bidding time, which can change all the estimates of enterprises.

At first, when preparing to undertake the projects, enterprises believed that they would make profits, but later, enterprises realized that they took losses because the input costs of the projects increase too sharply.

Unit price and norms make enterprises suffer

Software firms believe that government agencies should not issue the regulations on unit price or software pricing, because software products cannot be valued. Clients would be ready to pay several million dollars to the software companies which can help bring them the benefits of 100 million dollars, even though the software companies only spend one dollar to make the products. Meanwhile, if the software products do not bring benefits to clients, the products would be useless, even though their production costs are high at 10 million dollars.

Do Cao Bao, a senior executive of the Corporation for Financing and Promoting Technology FPT, commented that if the unreasonable policies are not amended, it may lead to the fact that software companies will only make low quality software products to provide to state agencies.

Truong Thi Hai Duong, Head of the IT Application Division of the General Taxation Department, representing the state agencies which use software products provided by domestic firms, also said that the regulations on the unit price and norms will put difficulties for the development of the software industry in Vietnam.

Previously, the pay to a software worker was one million dong per working day. Meanwhile, under a new regulation, the figure has dropped to 100,000-160,000 dong. As a result, software companies have to “artificially increase” the number of working days in order to get more money. A company with 50 or 100 software workers would declare the number of working days of up to several hundreds of thousands of working days.

A question has been raised that why state agencies and software firms have to declare wrong numbers of working days, and why don’t they try to ask to amend the unreasonable mechanism?

Sources said that the Ministry of Information and Communication organized many workshops discussing the issue, from which government agencies have realized that the current regulations are unreasonable. However, it still takes time to change the regulations.

Source: Buu dien