When it was announced that Wipro would exit India’s wonderfully named “Nifty 50” index of powerhouse stocks at the end of September 2026, it felt if not quite the end of an era, then a tapering off of what was once an uber-trend in the modern IT services sector.
Indian IT offshorers boomed through the enterprise resource planning (ERP) charge of the late 1990s as enterprises sought to protect against the looming fallout of the Y2K bug and join up what had been mismatched enterprise applications.
Bloomberg saw the Wipro episode as reflecting the “waning clout” of Indian giants, and it may be the case that India has been challenged by an increasingly saturated market. But the news may also have been reflective of a more slow-burning trend: the rise of other services firms worldwide with the skills, hunger and culture to address artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging opportunities with a strong value proposition.
Keen viewers of World Cup football pitchside banners may have noted the presence of Argentina’s Globant, while there are also significant players operating globally with roots in Malaysia, China and the Philippines.
But perhaps the most interesting of the insurgents is FPT, the Vietnamese juggernaut that is carving more than a niche through outsourcing, software development and other adjacent opportunities in much the same way that the likes of Wipro, Tata, Infosys and others from India did all those years ago.
Star of Asia
Vietnam is the star turn of southeast Asia’s growth, growing at over 8%, faster even than fast-risers such as Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. The country is consistently ranked as the top regional outperformer by McKinsey. Growth in the region is powered by technology, with Vietnam aspiring to become a global top 25 economy by 2038, propelled by state-backed initiatives to weave a digital identity, banking and government services fabric, supported by ubiquitous mobile broadband.
The virtuous circle also includes robust foreign financial investment, helping to attract the likes of tech superpowers including Apple, Intel, Nvidia and Samsung. A healthy portion of those investments focus on research and development (R&D) and sophisticated low-level engineering activities such as semiconductor fabrication.
But the jewel in the crown of Vietnamese tech scene is indisputably FPT, a wide-ranging player in software development, outsourcing, digital transformation, telecoms and infrastructure. The company even has its own university campuses where legions of the country’s youth pursue digital dreams and from whom FPT can cherry-pick talent.
FPT has become increasingly hard to miss. Its logo has even been on the sleeves of Chelsea FC footballers, the London club with which it has an ongoing partnership for fan experience and other transformation projects. And outside the rarefied world of elite sport, FPT is making inroads in both the public and private sectors of the UK and other countries outside its homeland.
Dang Tran Phuong, FPT head of Europe and Middle East, who joined FPT in 2004 and has held management roles in FPT’s US market unit and across key accounts in aviation and logistics, said its ambitions are sky-high, and its plan is to replicate its formula from its native country.
“We believe that the UK and other countries want similar things,” he said. “Value, time to market and new skills. We are an AI-first company and we are good at complex challenges that can serve the UK, such as quantum computing and building AI skills.”
“We are an AI-first company and we are good at complex challenges that can serve the UK, such as quantum computing and building AI skills.”
Dang Tran Phuong, FPT
By focusing on AI and other emerging technologies, Phuong believes FPT has the formula to succeed everywhere. The firm’s current strategy encompasses nearshoring opportunities that capitalise on Vietnam’s choice geographical location, but also extends to having a global reach.
Phuong noted that FPT now has 85,000 staff across 30 countries, and 1,100 customers. Overseas outsourcing deals are up about 30% year on year (YoY) and $10m-plus outsourcing contracts are becoming more common. FPT recorded almost $2.7bn in total revenue in 2025.
AI, of course
Emblematic of the rapid change and pursuit of a market-altering inflexion point is AI, seen by FPT and Phuong as a way to fast-track its progress in a world seeking talent in the space. However, he added, software engineering, industrial transformation, computer visualisation and even drones are on its menu of offers.
More recently, FPT has extended its ecosystem and the company now has far-reaching connections to many of the core technology providers that are critical to Western ambitions, such as Salesforce, Palantir, AWS, OpenAI and Sitecore.
Another key area is cyber security, where FPT recently inked a deal with OpenAI to proactively protect customers using AI frontier models and agentic adaptations to processes and workflows. Rather than using third-party alternatives, FPT uses Casan, its own five-stage transformation maturity framework that lets clients evolve from ‘curious’ to a sophisticated ‘native’ stage, via augmented, standard and automatic steps.
Phuong said that Casan is augmented by FPT’s FleziPT AI ecosystem. The results, he says, will be demonstrable in terms of time to market and cost efficiencies, with 60% shaved off development schedules and 30% greater developer productivity.
FPT is working with giants including Microsoft, Nvidia, SAP and Anthropic to make FleziPT a centrepiece of industrialising AI for enterprises. A July 2026 Forrester Consulting survey, From pilots to reusable platforms: a blueprint for scaling enterprise AI, suggested that only around a quarter of enterprises polled feel advanced in their AI efforts, and FPT believes a ladder approach is needed.
Is Vietnam in the right place at the right time?
With geopolitics fraught and enterprises seeking new sources of innovation as well as lower cost bases, FPT and Vietnam may be in the right place at the right time, just as India once was.
Jon Collins, an analyst at Inter Orbis, said: “I am a great believer in diminishing thresholds and how they either enable new tech platforms – which is how social media suddenly exploded – or service models.
“AI is rapidly changing business models around software and service provision, enabling faster-moving organisations anywhere in the world to become players in this ecosystem, where they might previously have been slowed by skills acquisition or other costs of entry.
“India previously threw its weight into business and technology education to respond to the demand for lower-cost outsourced services, starting with call centres and quickly shifting to more advanced business process outsourcing. With AI including open models, other countries can follow a similar trajectory without requiring such a significant national investment.”
Clients like the speed of work, problem-solving mindset and access to rare skills.
Ashkan Marandi, head of engineering and product development at Davies Insurance, said: “We partner with FPT because they can provide us with offshore capabilities and speed, and to be able to use the technical experience within the BFSI [banking, financial services and insurance] sector.”
IDC analyst Linus Lai believes FPT’s distinguishing characteristics cover both skills and products: “FPT stands out for combining three things few providers have at once: an owned talent engine through FPT University; platform-led delivery built on reusable IP and a ‘best-shore model’; and a full AI stack that now runs from GPU infrastructure in the AI factory to agentic platforms like IvyHub, where IDC positions them as a Leader in Asia/Pacific.
“That combination has earned FPT the right to win on execution at scale, which they have done successfully in Japan (their cultural alignment is a big factor in this). The next question is whether FPT can win in more strategic, forward-looking guidance and industry thought leadership. And there is that opportunity to shift toward outcome-based pricing and expand the AI factory globally.”
Of course, FPT and Vietnam have a way to go before they can be compared with India’s remarkable advances on the IT stage. But that formula of combining Western-style ideas, such as Google-like learning campuses, and the hunger of an outsider could be an attractive proposition to many in the West.
