The ambitious businessmen dreaming of int’l success
Following initial success, some Vietnamese businessmen have made daring decisions pouring trillions of dong into huge projects, vowing to turn their conglomerates into businesses of international stature.
 |
Nguyen Duc Tai, president of MWG, the mobile phone distribution chain, has successfully persuaded MWG shareholders to allocate a budget of VND2.5 trillion to expand its home appliance distribution chain and build a drugstore chain.
Some months ago, Tai also submitted a plan on expanding the network, but it cost several hundreds of billions of dong only. Just after a short time, the plan became five times bigger.
The plan was implemented as soon as it got approval. Tran Anh Digital (TAG) has consulted with its shareholders about the sale of stakes to MWG. Once acquiring TAG, MWG will become the Vietnamese largest technology product and home appliance distributor.
The domestic smartphone market has been stirred by the launch of BPhone, a model designed and made by a Vietnamese company – BKAV. The company’s CEO, Nguyen Tu Quang, is well known in Vietnam as an ambitious technologist and businessman.
Vietnam has many other Vietnamese smartphone brands, but BPhone, priced at around VND10 million, is the first product which targets the high-end market and competes directly with products from the world’s biggest manufacturers – Samsung and Apple.
Quang has caught attention from the public with the statement that he will not hesitate to confront technology giants, or manufacturers in software and hardware, even in terms of R&D and production.
There is another famous businessman who nurtures ambitions second to none. He has been succeeding both overseas and in Vietnam, and in many different fields, including instant noodle production, real estate, retail and automobile manufacturing.
Bloomberg has quoted its sources as reporting that Vuong’s Vingroup and its foreign shareholder Warburg Pincus are considering offering to sell US$600 million through IPO in the domestic market to raise funds for speeding up Vincom Retail, a subsidiary of Vingroup.
Duong Cong Minh, president of Him Lam Group, is nurturing an ambitious plan with Sacombank. Owning big assets and succeeding with investments in real estate and banking sectors, the businessman from Bac Ninh recently decided to become president of Sacombank to recover the bank which once led the banking system.
Minh hopes it will take three years to restructure Sacombank instead of 10 years, as initially planned.
The ambitious investment plans by young businessmen have caught special attention from foreign investors. Foreign funds managed by Dragon Capital are pouring big money into MWG.
Big institutions have also injected big money into Vingroup. Vuong has announced a huge investment of US$3.5 billion in an automobile manufacturing project.
