Entering Vietnam: A Market Study on Maritime Training Simulators for Image Soft Oy

Description

In recent years, Vietnam has witnessed strong growth and remarkable improvement in var-ious sectors such as economics, education and finance. It emerges as a promising market for international companies regardless of size. The thesis aims to investigate the market potential of training simulators in Vietnam for the commissioning company, Image Soft Oy, with the priority in maritime academies. The study also explores the country's maritime education system concentrating on maritime navigation and maritime training. By outlining the theoretical framework, knowledge base and analyzing researched data, results with the main findings and recommendations will be given to the case company with critical thoughts. The theoretical framework and knowledge base developed in this thesis consist of four ma-jor branches which explain the process of different research phases fully. Theory on strate-gic analysis tools in international marketing aims to explore the characteristics of the Viet-namese market, with the emphasis on the maritime sector. The study also examines the competitiveness of the case company. The theoretical background on business-to-business markets provides an understandings of the characteristics of the B2B market, institutional markets, value-added resellers, B2B buying and buyer behavior. Additionally, the thesis includes a knowledge base on the maritime education system in Vietnam and on maritime training simulators. The author conducted this research-based thesis by applying an exploratory research de-sign. The research methods include two phases, secondary research and primary research. Secondary research makes use of secondary data analysis by acquiring data from books, industry articles, publications, and government and administration portals. Meanwhile, pri-mary research is executed during a two-week business trip in Vietnam. It includes eight interviews as a combination of questionnaires, face-to-face interviews, phone calls and Skype interviews made in Finland. The findings from the market research address different issues in the current maritime training simulator market of Vietnam. In brief, there is potential for selling the simulator products of Image Soft to several key maritime academies in the country. The results show that the infrastructure of Vietnamese education is relatively weak and not fully in conformity with international standards. In the meantime, maritime education is striving to integrate with international requirements by 2018. Needs and requirements vary depending on the educa-tion missions and objectives of individual academies from vocational colleges to universi-ties. Undoubtedly, the instant business opportunity is found amongst the researched acad-emies. However, the largest obstacles are their limited budget plan and hierarchical admin-istration model. On the other hand, the market appears to include several potential resellers who are inter-ested in selling maritime simulators supplied by Image Soft. Prior to the publication of this thesis, the author also discussed the above findings with the case company in an official presentation following a confidential market report.

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