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, and behind only Russia in all of Europe, in terms of population. Moreover, the Vietnamese population is remarkably young, with 26.3 percent of the people between 0 and 14 years of age and 75 percent of the population under the age of 35 (CIA Factbook, 2008). By this standard, the average Vietnamese is half the age of an average Western European. Given the correlation between youth and wireless use (Wilska 2003, p. 441), Vietnam's population is therefore the ideal consumer base for a wireless services provider, not only at this moment but well into this century given the vast number of Vietnamese who will be entering adolescence and youth in the decades to come.

After half a century of bloody and debilitating war with the Chinese, French, and Americans, Communist Vietnam attained unification and independence in 1975. However, the country's leadership did not hew closely to the economic policies of doctrinaire Communism, choosing in 1986 to adopt a functionally capitalistic approach to the economy. Vietnam is part of the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) and has bilateral trade agreements with many Western countries, including the United States. Economically, Vietnam is integrated into the global economy, although admittedly not at the blistering pace of China. According to recent research, foreign-invested companies “cumulatively accounted for around 27% of the country's (non-oil) exports, 35% of the country's total industrial output...13% of Vietnam's GDP...[and] 25% of total tax revenues” (Freeman, 2002). This illustrates the impressive extent to which the Vietnamese government has primed the economy for foreign companies.

Culturally, Vietnam is no longer the closed-off, rural state it was for much of the twentieth century. Like other countries in the region, Vietnam has urbanized in a way that is friendly to consumerism: “the burgeoning urban centers of Vietnam-Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City-are demonstrating their commercial role in the opening up of Vietnam by the increasing use of billboards along the main thoroughfares, advertising Western consumer goods” (Andrews, Chompusri, & Baldwin 2002, p. 262).

Moreover, after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, both the Vietnamese government and people have demonstrated their openness to the values and products of Americans in particular and Western nations in general, indicating that the country has never had an existential problem with the West: “It is interesting to note that, because Vietnam is changing so quickly, some attitudes now resemble those of the West” (Ashwill and Diep 2005, p. 94).

The Vietnamese economy has grown steadily at a rate of between 7 and 8.5 percent, and the government has repeatedly demonstrated its ability and desire to keep the country growing at this rate. Vietnam's growth plan includes integrating more closely with Western business interests, as a perusal of the privatization plans for the mobile marketplace (q.v.) will demonstrate.

All of these factors bode well for Vodafone's success in this market.

Strategic Formulation:战略规划
The purpose of entering Vietnam is twofold: to gain an improved foothold in the Asia-Pacific marketplace, which is providing a booming number of wireless subscribers to the global market; and to pick up a quick win for Vodafone in a market that will be easier to penetrate than China. The strategic and tactical lessons learned in Vi