HANOI, April 19 (Xinhua) -- Despite slowing growth in the first quarter, Vietnam remains a promising market for e-commerce, Vietnam News reported on Wednesday.

E-commerce is expected to be the fastest-growing and the most stable sector this year, said industry experts at the Vietnam Online Business Forum 2023 held in Hanoi.

Vietnam's e-commerce expanded by more than 25 percent to over 20 billion U.S. dollars this year, said the Vietnam E-commerce Association, estimating that retail e-commerce sales accounted for 8.5 percent of the country's total retail sales of consumer goods and services worth 5,680 trillion Vietnamese dong (240 billion U.S. dollars).

With a population expected to soon reach 100 million, Vietnam has a large domestic market and a growing middle class population, while many Vietnamese are digital consumers with smartphone penetration reaching 73.5 percent of adult population by 2022, according to the Ministry of Information and Communications.

As Vietnamese people spend approximately seven hours a day online, mostly on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, but also on local chat app Zalo, local companies have managed to blend online sharing and shopping, especially on the TikTok social platform, said the e-commerce association.

A survey conducted by the association showed that up to 65 percent of businesses have put their goods on social networking platforms, especially through interactive live streams.

Selling on social networks is also considered the most effective, surpassing other forms such as websites or business applications, as well as e-commerce.

The Vietnam News report said that the total sales of the top four e-commerce platforms, along with TikTok Shop, amounted to about 6 billion U.S. dollars.

Shopee and Lazada are the two largest e-commerce platforms in Vietnam, followed by TikTok Shop which just started off in the country in the middle of last year.

Vietnam is expected to be the fastest-growing e-commerce market in Southeast Asia by 2026, with e-commerce gross merchandise value reaching 56 billion dollars by 2026, 4.5 times the estimated value of 2021, according to a report by Facebook and Bain & Company. Enditem

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