Vietnam – An Emerging Software Outsourcing Location

Shaped like an elongated S, Vietnam stretches the length of the Indochina Peninsula, bordered by China in the north, Laos and Cambodia in the west, and the East Sea in the east.

Vietnam boasts an age-long and special culture that is closely attached to the history of the formation and development of the nation. The Vietnamese national culture emerged from a unique living environment: a tropical country with many rivers and the confluence of great cultures (local culture, the culture that mixed with those of China and other countries in the region, and the culture that interacted with Western one). The natural conditions (temperature, humidity, monsoon, water-flows, water-rice agriculture …) exert a remarkable impact on the material and spiritual life of the nation, the characteristics and psychology of the Vietnamese. However, social and historical conditions exert an extremely great influence on culture and national psychology. Thus, there are still cultural differences between Vietnam and other water-rice cultures like Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, and so on even though sharing the same Southeast Asian cultural origin. The most prominent feature of the Vietnamese culture is that it was not assimilated by foreign cultures, but was able to utilize and localize those from abroad to enrich itself.