'Vietnam is an important highlight' - Larry Jordan

Larry Jordan, product manager for Yahoo! Southeast Asia, came to Ho Chi Minh City yesterday preparing to step into business in Vietnam market. Tuoi Tre has an exchange around the intentions of the "giant" in this virtual world.

* Vietnamese people often have a habit of using Google's information search program. What do you think about this?

- We are constantly developing and perfecting our search engine suite. To access the Vietnamese market, we have launched a Vietnamese search page at vn.search.yahoo.com.

We clearly identify the 1 billion future internet users in non-English speaking countries, including Southeast Asia, which is an extremely important highlight.

* The amount of Vietnamese people using Yahoo messenger is huge, an unofficial statistic indicates that it is just behind the US. What will Yahoo do for this large market?

- In a very near future, we will edit Yahoo services into an email service in Vietnamese, Yahoo's main page in Vietnamese, Yahoo Vietnamese news and all other content will also be available. in Vietnamese.

Up to this point, we consider Vietnam a very important market and will focus its resources to introduce new products exclusively for the Vietnamese market. Yahoo's next five-year plan in Vietnam has been carefully researched.

* Vietnamese users are complaining about the speed with which Yahoo's email service is getting slower .

- We have just heard about this and are doing everything to improve the speed of access to Yahoo mail. Back to Vietnam, we also want to work more specifically with VN Internet service provider to upgrade Yahoo's service.

* Vietnamese youths are very capable in the field of information technology. Are you planning to recruit them?

13% of the hundreds of millions of hours of Internet access every day worldwide are using Yahoo services.

LARRY JORDAN

- Of course. Send me a personal profile to the email address sg-jobs-hr@yahoo-inc.com. We need talented people everywhere in the world. Diversity is the most important factor of Yahoo.

That's why we don't distinguish citizenship. But certainly among Yahoo's 9,660 global employees there will be a lot of Vietnamese.

* Is your visit to Vietnam looking for partners? What should a domestic company want to be a Yahoo partner?

- We have some favorable partners in Vietnam like Tuoi Tre newspaper. But to develop more service systems in Vietnam, we are in need of more domestic partners. We are willing to discuss with any company that is willing to cooperate at sg-sales@yahoo-inc.com.

* What is the last message you want to send to Yahoo users in Vietnam?

- Your country grows too fast. This is a very exciting time. Communication and information are two key issues of Vietnam's development today. Yahoo wants to be part of this. Please help us bring all Vietnamese people the best service.

TRAN NGUYEN - TIEN HUNG performed