Vietnam 6G deal gives Qualcomm a foothold in Huawei’s export markets

Viettel is the first company admitted to Qualcomm’s 6G Early Access Program. The Vietnam 6G agreement’s most consequential clause is not about 6G.

Vietnam 6G development took an unusual turn this week when Qualcomm named a military-owned Vietnamese operator, rather than a partner in the United States or South Korea, as the first company admitted to its 6G Early Access Program.

Viettel High Tech, the technology arm of Viettel Group, signed the agreement in Hanoi on Monday. Nguyen Minh Quang, chief executive of Viettel High Technology Industries Corporation, signed alongside Durga Malladi, executive vice president and general manager for technology planning, edge solutions and data centre at Qualcomm Technologies. The two companies have worked together on 5G Open RAN equipment since 2022.

The stated goal is a pre-commercial 6G call in early 2029 on infrastructure Viettel has designed, developed and manufactured itself. Under the terms, Viettel handles research, design, integration, manufacturing, testing and quality evaluation of 6G base stations. Qualcomm supplies the chipset platform and development tools, and the two will assess how Viettel’s equipment performs against Qualcomm’s 6G platform under real operating conditions. Early access means Viettel can build products in parallel with Qualcomm’s chipset development rather than waiting for commercial release. 

That is the part of the announcement everyone has reported. The more consequential clause sits further down.

What Vietnam 6G buys Qualcomm

Alongside the 6G work, the two companies agreed to expand international markets for Viettel’s 5G equipment across Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa and Latin America. Qualcomm’s role is to introduce Viettel to operators and partners in those markets. Viettel supplies the products and the deployment experience.

Those four regions are where Huawei and ZTE have built their strongest positions outside China, largely on price and financing terms that Ericsson and Nokia have struggled to match. A Vietnamese vendor selling Qualcomm-based radio equipment gives operators in those markets a third option that is neither Chinese nor European, at a price point the European vendors are unlikely to reach.

For Qualcomm, which sells chipsets rather than base stations, the arrangement extends its silicon into infrastructure tenders it would otherwise have no route into. For Hanoi, it advances a long-standing policy goal of turning “Make in Vietnam” telecoms equipment into an export industry.

The gap between the ambition and the installed base

Viettel’s own numbers are worth holding against the language of mastering core technology.

The operator has deployed 24,000 5G base stations across Vietnam and plans to add 20,000 more this year. More than 15% of that equipment was researched and produced by Viettel High Tech, according to the company. 

The remainder comes from the vendors that have supplied Viettel for years. Ericsson announced in late 2024 that it had won the majority of Viettel’s nationwide 5G RAN deployment, and Nokia disclosed a contract covering 22 provinces and around 2,500 sites shortly before that.

Viettel was classified as a Niche Player in Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for CSP 5G RAN infrastructure solutions. Its 5G Open RAN solution developed with Qualcomm delivers up to 24% energy savings under high-load conditions, according to the company’s own figures.

An operator supplying a sixth of its own network, at niche-player scale, is a credible domestic manufacturer. It is some distance from a vendor capable of winning competitive RAN tenders in markets where Huawei is already installed and financed.

Hanoi is hedging in both directions

The Qualcomm agreement also sits against a procurement picture that has been moving the other way.

Vietnam spent years keeping Chinese vendors out of its mobile networks, a stance that Viettel’s then-chief executive publicly framed in 2019 as a security judgement in favour of Ericsson and Nokia. That position has softened. Telecoms Tech News reported in November that a group including Huawei won a $23 million 5G equipment contract in April, and that ZTE had secured at least two antenna contracts worth more than $20 million, with Ericsson, Nokia and Qualcomm still holding the core.

Washington has treated the exclusion of Chinese firms from Vietnam’s digital infrastructure as a condition of deeper technology cooperation. The Qualcomm deal reads as Hanoi keeping that channel open at the level that matters most to the US, which is silicon and standards, while allowing cheaper Chinese equipment into lower-value tenders.

The number that will settle whether any of this works is not the 2029 call. It is the first firm order for Viettel RAN equipment from an operator outside Vietnam, in a market where Huawei is already bidding. Nothing in Monday’s announcement indicates one exists yet.

Photo by erika m/Unsplash

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