Ninja Van - a Singapore-based shipping company operating in Vietnam, mainly serves the delivery needs of domestic e-commerce platforms and in Southeast Asia. On the company's official website, in the post office search support section, the company integrates a third-party map service to display locations in Vietnam for users and sellers to send goods. However, in the East Sea, this map does not show the two archipelagos of Hoang Sa and Truong Sa under Vietnam's sovereignty.
According to a note on the Ninja Van website, this map is provided by Mapbox and OpenStreetMap, two businesses that provide integrated mapping services on websites, applications, and hardware devices. Mapbox claims that it "provides precise location data," while OpenStreetMap claims that this platform is built by a community of map users who specialize in providing details about places, streets, etc. around the world.
The map used by Ninja Van does not fully display information about Vietnam's sovereignty
On the map used by Ninja Van, the locations of the two archipelagos under Vietnam's sovereignty are not marked or annotated. When zooming in on the map, these places are just white dots, with no terrain data or any related information.
Thanh Nien Newspaper contacted Ninja Van's spokesperson in Vietnam as well as the communications manager at its headquarters in Singapore but received no response. By the end of May 26, the company remained silent and there was no change to the map missing the two mentioned archipelagos.
Ninja Van is not the only multinational company operating in Vietnam that uses a map service that does not reflect Vietnam's sovereignty over its territory and territorial waters. On May 25, a person claiming to be an employee of TCL Vietnam Electronics (based in Ho Chi Minh City) posted a photo of a map of Vietnam on the wall that did not include the Hoang Sa and Truong Sa archipelagos. TCL later made a correction on its official Facebook fan page but quickly deleted it the same day.
In early April 2023, ride-hailing service Grab also had to apologize after the community discovered that the company used a map with incorrect information about Vietnam's sovereignty. A day later, fashion brand Yody also received many criticisms and calls for a "boycott" for using a map with incorrect information about Vietnam's sovereignty. At the end of 2022, Apple had to edit the content on the Maps application integrated on iOS and iPadOS operating systems due to a similar error after receiving a request from Hanoi.
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