There are partners you sign with and then each goes their own way. And there are organisations you step into, take on a piece of the work, and stay — not because a contract holds you there, but because the work itself does. For me, SPT belongs to the second kind.
Why I Write This — In All Honesty
I am not writing about SPT as an outsider looking in at a thirty-year-old corporation. I write from the inside. On 21 July 2026, SPT's Digital Technology and Services Centre issued a decision to establish an Office in Da Nang and put me in charge of it. A small office, run on open resourcing, self-funded, reporting monthly. Nothing glamorous. But from that day on, I had a seat inside the organisation, a piece of work to do, and a question to answer every month: what have you brought back for the system this month?
I once wrote about being a professional employee. With SPT, I practise exactly what I wrote. The founder of a company can still be a decent employee somewhere else, if he understands that the organisation is bigger than himself, and that taking on a piece of the work means taking on responsibility for the rest of it too.
A Bond That Began with a Stamp
I met SPT not at a signing table, but through a product. In July 2026, SPT unveiled Strace — a traceability platform developed in-house by the corporation, with trace codes built to national and GS1 standards, confirmed on 16 July 2026 to be connected to the National Traceability Portal. I wrote about it in the piece "Origin Is a Promise". That small stamp affixed to a mango, a bottle of fish sauce — to me, it is a digital passport for Vietnamese goods. When a thirty-year-old telecom corporation is willing to bend down and make that stamp for a farmer, I understood this was an organisation I wanted to walk alongside.
Then came Scharge. It is the smart rest-stop and charging-station network project led by SPT, in which the corporation holds the brand, the application platform, the equipment standards and the telecom infrastructure, while our CD Restop takes on developing and operating the rest-stop network across its four tiers. I appreciate the way SPT divides the work: each side does what it does best, and no one treads on anyone else's ground. I appreciate the way they named the project with a sentence rather than a slogan: where digital transformation meets green transformation. And this is what I appreciate most: from 1 September 2026, CD Restop's office moved to 54 Hồ Thị Tư — right inside an SPT branch, with a Scharge charging-pole display area on the ground floor. You don't let a passing partner sit under the same roof.
9 September — Four Documents, Three Chapters
On the afternoon of 9 September 2026 at the Kỳ Hòa Bến Thành Hotel, more than 110 delegates watched four documents signed across three chapters. Chapter I was the Scharge foundation: SPT, CD Restop, DTH Holdings and Coro Energy signed a strategic cooperation agreement, with our side signed by Chairwoman of the Board of Directors Annie Nguyễn. Chapter II was the network: charging-station equipment, land bank, design, on-site services. Chapter III was the Digital City: SPT signed a memorandum of understanding with Smartsys, a member of DTH Holdings, on digital transformation platforms — with CD Restop standing as a witnessing party, in its capacity as network operator.
I noticed one detail. Of the four documents, we signed two and witnessed two. To witness is not to stand outside. To witness is to commit that when those digital platforms need a foothold in real life — a digital citizen kiosk at a rest stop, a policy notice board at a ward office — we will be that foothold. Digitalisation needs ground to land on. The rest-stop network is that ground.
I want to be clear so no one reads too much into this. The figures of 34 provinces and cities, 500 rest stops and 14,000 satellite charging points are targets of the Scharge Project, not the current state of things. The documents signed on 9 September are agreements and memoranda of understanding, not contracts. The first pilot site lies in the future tense. What is already real is that these people sat down at the same table, and that an organisation gave me a place to work.
Digital Transformation with the City, Then Further Still
Since early 2026, SPT has been a digital-transformation partner enterprise of the Viet Nam Fatherland Front Committee of Ho Chi Minh City and the city's Digital Transformation Centre — the corporation announced this on its own site back in February. When I stepped into the organisation, I stepped onto a road that already had a direction. My job is to place onto that road the thing we do best: rest stops, that is, the place where travellers, workers, and residents of wards and communes touch digital transformation with their own hands rather than through slogans.
And from Da Nang, where my small office is based, I can see what comes next. Central Vietnam, the Central Highlands, then the provinces along the North–South axis. Each province will have its own Strace stamp for its farm produce, a Scharge pole for the first electric vehicle passing through, and a rest stop where all of that finds its footing. I make no promise of dates. I only promise a way of working: think it through properly from the start, build one point at a time, and let each point repeat the one before it.
So What Do I Remind Myself Of?
- Be a person of the organisation first, a founder second. At SPT I have a superior, a monthly report, and work I must hand in. That is good for me.
- Do not speak for the corporation. SPT's strategy is announced by SPT. I only tell the part of the work I was given and what I believe.
- Do not mistake targets for the current state. Every figure carries the word «target» until the day the first site opens.
- Measure by the work, not by the ceremony. 9 September is the starting point. Results are measured next quarter, and the quarter after that.
- Be grateful to the right people. A thirty-year-old organisation opened its door to a new employee. I keep faith with that door.
A Final Word
People often ask me: you own a company, so why take on a small office at another corporation? I answer with the very lesson I learned in Da Nang: sometimes, stopping is also a way of moving forward. I set my founder's ego aside for a while, to stand within a larger formation. Within that formation, I find my road stretches far longer than it ever would walking alone.
A bond, to me, is not about meeting. A bond is about staying — and working together until the first stamp is affixed to a mango in a distant province, the first vehicle plugs in at a rest stop, and a resident of some ward, for the first time, completes their paperwork on a machine set up right beside the place they stop to rest every day.
The rest — is doing the work.
Da Nang, September 2026 — Nguyễn Ngọc Hải