Esoft’s transformation into a tech company also requires new skills at Esoft Vietnam, which employs more than 700 people. Danish values and a healthy working environment are Esoft’s trump card in the intensified battle for Vietnam’s tech talent.

Esoft Vietnam and its more than 700 local employees already play a key role in Esoft’s global production setup.

That role will only grow as AI takes over the less desirable, repetitive work, freeing up Esoft’s employees for other, more value-creating tasks – including in Vietnam.

This year alone, Thomas Frisenberg, CEO of Esoft Vietnam, expects to need 5-6 IT developers. In the long run, Esoft Vietnam will also most likely need AI and data analysis specialists as technological development drives Esoft Vietnam’s skill needs.

“We’ve already made a lot of improvements to our solutions,” Frisenberg says. “But if we are to keep making ground, we need the right people.”

Intensified Battle for Talent

However, the battle for talent has intensified in the Hanoi province, which has more than 15 million inhabitants.

In recent years, as wages in China and other places have risen and Vietnam’s universities have begun to churn out tech talent, the province has become an important hub in the global supply chain of the tech and manufacturing industries. On top of this, an increasing number of well-educated Vietnamese professionals who have studied abroad are choosing to return to Vietnam to forge their futures. According to Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training, some 170,000 Vietnamese students were studying abroad in 2019.

Growth in foreign investment is doubling every year, and Hanoi province forecasts total exports of $11 billion in 2020 – a tenfold increase in six years, according to the financial media Bloomberg (read here).

Vietnam as a Tech Hub

Samsung is present in the province, as are other tech and IT giants like Canon, Intel and Foxconn. Most recently, Apple, along with several subcontractors already in the area, reportedly plans to establish their own production in the country.

“Vietnam has become a tech hub. We’ve become really strong in software development, and there is a huge demand for talent because more and more of the very big tech companies have established themselves in and around Hanoi,” explains Thomas Frisenberg.

“We need some of the same skills as the big tech giants. Fortunately, we’re really good at keeping our employees, but we’re certainly noticing that it’s become harder to get them in through the door.”

Danish Values and Working Environment

After many years in the country, Frisenberg believes Esoft has a great reputation in Vietnam. At the same time, the flat hierarchy, freedom with responsibility, and clearly defined career paths have contributed to Esoft Vietnam’s employee retention.

“We’ve worked really hard to be strong on CSR by, among other things, having a goal of 12 percent of our employees being people who have a physical disability. And it has been shown that this significantly benefits the working environment, as well as being really attractive, including for highly educated workers,” Frisenberg explains.

It is precisely these virtues that will continue to make Esoft competitive when it comes to attracting Vietnam’s sharpest minds amid fierce competition with Apple and the other tech giants.

“I think, with all due modesty, that we can offer working conditions and professional challenges that fully match those found elsewhere in Hanoi. Not least because we can combine this with healthy values and joint responsibility for making a mark on the exciting journey that Esoft is on,” Frisenberg concludes.

The introduction of AI to Esoft’s production will also be of great importance to Esoft Vietnam. The combination of new technology and a highly specialized workforce will make Vietnam a powerhouse in Esoft’s global supply chain.

Asia means much more than assembly line factories and access to cheap labor.

In Esoft’s case, our long-standing presence in Vietnam also equates to access to highly specialized labor and a large body of talent in software and IT.

Esoft employs more than 700 people at its office in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, and with the implementation of a range of AI solutions across Esoft’s organization (https://labs.esoft.com/chasing-the-perfect-image-esoft-launches -its-first-ai-solution/), the Hanoi office will play a key role in Esoft’s global supply chain.

“A large part of the value enhancement of Esoft’s solutions takes place in Vietnam,” says Thomas Frisenberg, CEO at Esoft Vietnam. “AI can make us even better and even smarter at this.”

“AI can help ensure that we can also use our Vietnamese employees for work tasks that are more value-creating than we do now,” he continues. “Not just in relation to our products at the current moment, but also those we will deliver tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.”

400 Photoshop Specialists

Since 2007, Esoft Vietnam has grown under Frisenberg’s leadership, transforming from handful of employees to more than 700 specialists servicing customers on five continents, with solutions in the field of image and video editing.

“Esoft employs about 400 Photoshop specialists in Hanoi, and it is these employees, among others, who will find that the AI solutions free up time for other, more exciting work tasks than basic image editing,” Frisenberg says.

“We already offer a number of retouching solutions, but this is something we can scale up even further thanks to the introduction of AI – partly because our employees can dedicate more time to such tasks.”

AI will Streamline Quality

From a purely commercial viewpoint, quality, consistency and efficiency are three of the keywords for Frisenberg when it comes to the impact AI will have on Esoft’s customer deliveries.

“AI can help streamline the quality of our solutions. There is absolutely no doubt about that. And given that AI will free up resources in the organization, it will also enable us to develop new add-ons to our solutions and make us competitive in new markets.”

A Southeast-Asian Tech Hub

Since 2000, Vietnam has been one of the fastest growing economies in Southeast Asia. According to World Bank figures, GDP per capita grew by a factor of 2.7 from 2002 to 2018, and more than 45 million Vietnamese people were lifted out of poverty in the same period.

After several years in the country, Frisenberg has experienced first-hand how Vietnam, and Hanoi in particular, has developed into an East-Asian tech hub for software development as the economy and living conditions have greatly improved.

The talent pool is as big as the competition for talent is fierce. Frisenberg also hopes that the increased strategic focus on AI and data can make Esoft an even more attractive workplace.

“We want to attract the right specialists from outside and, at the same time, upgrade the skills of some of our existing employees, because we can see that we will need some different and more creative skills in the future,” he concludes.

Danish magazine DataTech has published an article about Esoft’s best-in-class machine learning model. Read at the link below.

‘World class machine learning from Denmark enhances the quality of images.’

So goes the headline of a recent article published in Danish tech magazine DataTech. The article describes Esoft’s approach to machine learning and how a machine learning model, developed by Esoft’s data science department, proved to be best-in-class when benchmarked against similar models in an international AI verification database from MIT.

The article, written in Danish, can be found here. It does, however, require a subscription.

For more information on Esoft’s best-in-class AI model, please see this article “Esoft’s AI model is best-in-class”