State-owned mobile phone service providers VinaPhone and MobiFone will cut mobile charges by 20 percent as of December 15, the Viet Nam Post and Telecommunications Group announced on December 12.

For pre-paid subscribers, charges will fall by nearly 30 percent. Charges for inner-network calls will be 159.09 VND for the first six seconds and 26.52 VND for each following second, compared to 238 VND and 40 VND at present.

Charges for calls made between subscribers of other networks will be 180.9 VND for the first six seconds and 30.15 VND for each following second.

Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong said Vietnam's old imperial city of Hue could be developed into an international convention center, the Channel News Asia reported Thursday.

His comments came after he saw the city's sights and met local leaders.

It was Goh's first visit to central Vietnam.

Many young talents in HCM City wish to participate in the city’s large research projects. Presently, big projects are allocated to famed experts, which are then divided into smaller parts and assigned to young scientists and researchers.

Speaking at a talk on how to use young talents at home and aboard held by the HCM City Department of Science and Technology last week, Duong Thi Bich Hue, a lecturer of the HCM City University for Natural Sciences, said it is difficult to prove the ability of young intellectuals because they can take part in projects worth less than one hundreds of million dong only. The bigger projects are assigned to famous experts.

Vietnam is on Gartner’s, a reputed US market researcher, list of popular countries where IT groups outsource service operations.

Gartner has produced a list of 30 offshore service locations used by IT companies ranked based on the following criteria: cost, cultural similarity, intellectual property and data security, education, government assistance, legal stability, infrastructure, human resources, language and economic and political environment.

Though the demand for foreign currencies is expected to see slight increases in the coming months, experts still believe that the US$ deposit interest rates would go down in a couple of weeks.

The experts said that the US$ deposits interest rates in Vietnam are relatively high if compared to the world’s rates, especially after the US FED cut the interest rate for the third time in the year to 4.25% per annum. In fact, a lot of banks are considering lowering their deposit interest rates.