HANOI, April 20 - Vietnamese bank SHB and China’s Huawei Technologies Group formalised a strategic cooperation agreement on Sunday, SHB said.
Under the terms outlined by SHB, Huawei will aid the bank in designing technology architectures and constructing data platforms. The Chinese technology company will also provide support aimed at maintaining stable and safe operations, according to SHB’s statement.
The statement included a comment from a Huawei senior executive. Spawn Fan described the tie-up as "an important milestone in the group’s market expansion in Vietnam."
SHB’s announcement places the agreement in the context of Huawei’s growing footprint in the Vietnamese financial sector. The Vietnam Banks Association said Huawei has existing cooperation arrangements with other domestic financial institutions, naming SCB, SeABank and Home Credit. Those partnerships focus on digital transformation, security, data analytics, cloud computing, and the optimisation of banking system operations.
The agreement comes after a notable change in Vietnam’s approach to foreign vendors for telecommunications infrastructure. The statement notes that last year Huawei won contracts to build parts of Vietnam’s 5G network, a result described as a major shift from Hanoi’s previous policy that barred Chinese companies from participation in 5G infrastructure.
Additional text included with the original release referenced investment considerations for SHB. That material described an AI-based evaluation tool that reviews SHB alongside many other companies using a broad set of financial metrics and said the tool seeks to identify stocks with favourable risk-reward profiles. The text named past winners identified by the tool but did not provide further detail on the application of the tool to SHB in this announcement.
While the agreement spells out areas of technical support and operational assistance, SHB’s statement does not disclose detailed contractual terms, timelines, or financial arrangements tied to the cooperation. The announcement frames the partnership as part of Huawei’s broader commercial activity in Vietnam’s banking and telecom sectors.