CEO Rikkei Japan: Japanese people will have a different view of Vietnamese people

Rikkei Japan CEO, Mr. Bui Quang Huy (Top Forbes 30 Under 30 2018) said that Rikkei Japan has a team of personnel with deep understanding of the Japanese market that no Vietnamese enterprise in Japan has.

You volunteered to go to Japan and become a representative of Rikkei Japan. What made you think you could lead and operate the company well? Rikkeisoft works a lot with Japanese businesses, so it needs a legal entity in Japan. This legal entity ensures factors related to trust and the ability to develop Rikkeisoft in the Japanese market. Therefore, Rikkei Japan was born in 2016. For me personally, before opening a branch in Japan, I traveled between Japan and Vietnam many times for work, flying back and forth about once a month on average. During that time of traveling back and forth, I had the opportunity to meet many great people who are good at business in Japan, which inspired me to have many new business ideas. In addition, I wanted to "throw" myself into a completely different environment to challenge myself because I saw myself as capable of building an organization and a team. Therefore, I volunteered to go to Japan to develop the market in Japan. In fact, the business environment in Japan has developed for a very long time. The Japanese market is mature and professional. Therefore, the business environment in Japan is very transparent and fair. Moreover, the Japanese economy is very large, more than 4,000 billion USD and has not been fully exploited. Therefore, establishing a legal entity in Japan is more convenient for exploiting this market. I have studied in Japan so I am quite confident in both language exchange and understanding of market growth. Therefore, I see that I have cultural strengths, understanding the environment, knowing how to create opportunities, from which I am quite confident when going to Japan and running Rikkei Japan. When working with Japanese customers, it is important to understand customer psychology, Japanese people usually need a high level of trust and long-term commitment. I am confident in my ability to meet the needs of the Japanese market.

The IT market in Japan is considered very large and many countries are participating. Do you think that Vietnam's IT personnel are making the Japanese market lose its advantage to other countries? Currently, the IT market in Japan has a very large demand for human resources. According to the forecast of the Japanese Ministry of Economy, each year they lack about 300 thousand IT engineers and the level will become more and more serious in the future due to the aging problem. Entering the Japanese market is not easy, but many Vietnamese enterprises have done it. Before Vietnam, China entered the Japanese market very well. However, in the past 10 years, China's economy has developed quite a lot, gradually they no longer have the need to export to the Japanese market. In fact, China's IT personnel tend to be equal to or higher than Japan's. Therefore, 10-15 years ago, Japanese enterprises started to go to Vietnam (China + 1 wave) to find a market that can provide IT personnel at a more reasonable cost. Fortunately, our time (Rikkeisoft) was the time to catch that wave. In fact, Vietnam's economy now is like China's 10 years ago, the economy started to develop, the standard of living gradually improved and Vietnam's IT salary started to become much more competitive. The internal software industry of Vietnam is also stronger than 10 years ago.

However, in general, Vietnam's software export industry still does not have any worthy competitors to exploit the Japanese market in the short and medium term. About 5 years ago, Japan began to look into Myanmar because Myanmar's labor costs are very cheap, close to Japan and it is easy for Myanmar people to learn Japanese. However, Myanmar does not have a stable political system like Vietnam and their human resources are not many people who are good at technology, so Myanmar almost cannot continue. Besides, countries like Bangladesh or Nepal are still too small, not worth mentioning. As for India, it is clear that India works a lot with the US, uses English, so it is difficult to penetrate the Japanese market. Looking at the overall picture of the entire IT market in Japan, Vietnam is still a very important partner and cannot be withdrawn. As you shared, human resources are the key to creating a competitive advantage. So how does Rikkei Japan get good human resources to differentiate itself from competitors? In Vietnam, there are always many people, very dynamic, but when going to other markets, I clearly feel that to create great competitiveness in the market, the problem is whether there are people or not, whether there are enough personnel or not. Five years ago, Rikkei Japan focused on the story of price, but now, we focus on the advantages of technological capacity and human resources. So how to have enough personnel in both quantity and quality? First, to have a good number of personnel, Rikkei Japan has used good welfare policies and training programs for personnel development. Second, in terms of quality, first of all, in terms of technology, it is certain that they must be good. IT personnel need to understand new technologies and languages. The third thing to create good quality personnel is communication skills. In communication skills, the first important thing is foreign language skills. However, foreign language skills are not enough, but also need the ability to read the problem, grasp what the other party wants to convey. The last thing is the mindset of product development and problem solving. Most Vietnamese engineers who make products for testing are usually very fast, when they see a problem they immediately jump in to solve it. However, most of them only solve the tip of the iceberg, the mindset of creating a large system, millions of users and the ability to maintain it for decades later or to understand all the ins and outs before solving the problem is not much. This issue needs to be recognized in reality and learned from the Japanese. But in terms of decisiveness and speed, on the contrary, the Japanese have a lot to learn from the Vietnamese. In general, to have a good enough quantity and quality of IT personnel, Rikkei Japan always invests heavily in its team in terms of communication skills, working style and technical ability. Because that is the "backbone" for Rikkeisoft to develop sustainably in the long term.

Entering a demanding market like Japan, what strategy has Rikkei Japan used to operate strongly? The first strategy Rikkei Japan uses is prestige, always committed to accompanying customers in the long term. This is the most important philosophy when doing business in Japan. The second strategy is to demonstrate that the company always has the will to strive and grow. Then, customers will trust and stick with you longer. The third strategy is the quality factor. In addition to building relationships, when implementing projects together, the ability to develop products must be really good so that customers have a reason to stick with you. In fact, Rikkei Japan is no longer simply a processor, Rikkei has consulted and solved the problems raised by customers, even if the problem is vague, Rikkeisoft can still consult clearly and make detailed proposals to solve those problems. This is very different from the past, when I just received the design and sat down to code. But now it is not like that, Rikkei's team has to study each part very deeply, from there come up with solutions.

Currently, the digital transformation market for Japanese businesses is huge. How has Rikkei Japan entered this market? Let me talk a little about the state of digital transformation in Japan. In fact, if you compare Japan with China or Korea, Japan is completely behind. China and Korea use cards, QR codes, and facial recognition for payment as a normal thing. However, Japan is quite slow in catching up with other developed countries in digital transformation. It can be said that Japanese IT businesses are falling behind. Therefore, they have to start taking action to solve this problem. The first action Japan took was to establish the Ministry of Digital in September 2021, although it was quite late. This ministry is directly headed by the Prime Minister, has its own Minister of Digital, promotes digital transformation at businesses, and promotes the digitalization of personal identification My Number... Specifically, the Japanese Government stands up to support Japanese businesses in digital transformation. Japanese enterprises will develop proposals for digital transformation projects, submit them to the government and receive approval for subsidies. From there, companies like Rikkei Japan will provide services to solve operational problems for Japanese enterprises. Currently, Rikkei is a Vietnamese enterprise and has participated in digital transformation for Japan. Specifically, some digital transformation projects for Japanese enterprises such as Rikkei Smart Camera System - Solution for analyzing information from surveillance camera systems, applied in transportation, banking, healthcare, education ... In addition, we have the opportunity to build a virtual office for a Japanese customer, which means that all the previous ways of working between employees have completely changed from the environment, communication methods to the way of evaluating employee performance from BigData. Or the Rikkei Smart Call Center project - Solution to improve customer care, enhance customer experience, optimize costs and time. Rikkei eKYC – Electronic customer identification solution capable of verifying, identifying, and extracting information from images and personal documents with 99% accuracy.

Rikkei's AI technology is also applied in R&D and testing at unmanned automated stores of some supermarkets. Customers just need to come in, pawn their items and leave. The system will automatically recognize their identity and automatically deduct from the customer's delivery account. The solutions that Rikkei has implemented contribute to solving the problem of Japan's aging population.

Rikkei Japan continuously encourages and sends many employees to work in Japan. Is sending high-quality workers to Japan to change the way Japanese people view Vietnamese people? Up to now, Rikkei Japan has sent at least 1,000 Vietnamese IT engineers to work in Japan. Everyone sees that sending workers to Japan to improve their own capacity is good for themselves and the company. When there are many high-quality Vietnamese workers in Japan, creating value for the aging Japanese society, it is certain that the Japanese will have a different view of Vietnamese people. The image of Vietnamese people will thereby improve when viewed from the outside. Besides, Rikkeisoft or Rikkei Japan also have a deeper desire. If we look more broadly, Vietnam's population structure is now in the golden ratio stage, the most beautiful population triangle. Currently, the working-age population of Vietnam is very young. However, this will disappear after 10 - 20 years, Vietnam will face the problem of population aging just like China today and Japan 40 years ago. Therefore, this is the only time with many advantages to improve the qualifications of Vietnamese people, if not taken advantage of immediately, there will be no more opportunities later. Rikkei Japan, through the form of sending many high-quality workers to Vietnam, wants those workers themselves and their families to have experience abroad. In the long run, this will affect an entire generation when their children have many opportunities to contact new developed economies. Of course, everyone wants to go to Japan for a while and then return to contribute to the Fatherland, this is natural. The important thing is to recognize that this is a unique time to not only develop for this generation but also for the next generation. Every country has its own development cycle, especially small and latecomer countries like Vietnam, so take that as a lesson and an opportunity for development. After 7 years of operation in Japan, Rikkei Japan has contributed quite strongly to the Japanese community by sponsoring associations and building Vietnamese villages in Japan. Has the effectiveness of these activities met your and Rikkeisoft's leadership team's expectations?

Vietnamese businesses operating strongly abroad, especially in the high-tech industry, will obviously increase the level of national recognition (Vietnam) in that host country. From small things like increasing the rate of high-quality visas for Vietnamese people, strongly promoting the voice of the Vietnamese intellectual community, to macro issues about the relationship between the two countries. The Vietnamese village in Japan is a dream that we are promoting with the hope that Vietnamese people will live together, and work together in a number of fields, so they can share many things. The first thing that can be seen is that it will overcome the situation of being away from home. Actually, people who are away from home a lot will gradually get used to it, having brothers to share with each other will be much better. Rikkei Japan has a dormitory for all the brothers, where they are very happy, cooking Vietnamese food together, and having weekend parties together. Besides, Rikkei Japan also has table tennis and badminton tournaments to strengthen the spirit of brothers. Building a Vietnamese village in Japan like this not only solves the problem of accommodation but is also practical in solving spiritual problems, creating opportunities for brothers to exchange and interact with the community of fellow countrymen. According to the plan, Rikkei Japan will soon open more cafes and possibly Vietnamese-style restaurants to enrich the Vietnamese village in Japan. When the Vietnamese village in Japan has more people, more ideas will be implemented. One of the proud things is that Rikkei Japan has sponsored a scientific collection of Vietnamese people in Japan. The collection has many academic research works and core technologies that Vietnamese professors are researching in Japan. Or Rikkei Japan also contributes to organizing the Vietnam Summit in Japan periodically, gathering thousands of outstanding Vietnamese people living in Japan. Furthermore, we are currently cooperating with the association of Vietnamese professors at prestigious schools in Japan, and the association of highly qualified experts working at large corporations and multinational corporations in Japan. Let's sit together to see if this generation, this community can join hands to do something useful for the country. Rikkei Japan wants to show the Japanese that Vietnam also has large communities, with great knowledge, working in Japan and contributing to creating value for Vietnam - Japan. At that time, the Japanese will look at the Vietnamese and respect them more. (According to Nhip song thi truong/CafeF)

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