6 Vietnamese entrepreneurs who built conglomerates from zero: journeys and lessons

In the early 1990s, a geological economics graduate opened a restaurant and then began producing Mivina instant noodles in Kharkiv, Ukraine - just as the Soviet Union collapsed and convenient food became an urgent need. Mivina became a household brand in Ukraine; in 2010 he sold the business to Nestlé for a reported ~150 million USD.

From the early 2000s he brought the capital home to build Vinpearl and Vincom, later merged into Vingroup - spanning real estate, tourism, healthcare and education. In 2013, Forbes recognized him as Vietnam's first USD billionaire. His boldest pivot: pouring resources into VinFast - taking a Vietnamese electric vehicle brand global, with a Nasdaq listing in 2023.

Studying in Eastern Europe from age 17, she traded everything from electronics to rubber - earning her first million dollars at 21. Back home, she co-founded and invested in banking and real estate through the Sovico group and HDBank.

Her biggest bet was aviation: Vietjet Air took off in 2011 with a low-cost model at a time when flying was still a luxury for most Vietnamese. The "turn planes into sky buses" strategy let tens of millions of Vietnamese fly for the first time. In 2017, Forbes recognized her as Southeast Asia's first self-made female billionaire.

In 1992 he and friends founded a construction equipment trading company in Hanoi. Seeing demand for materials explode with the construction boom, Hoa Phat expanded into furniture, steel pipes, then construction steel - a capital-heavy industry few private companies dared enter at the time.

Unlike peers who diversified aggressively, Long is famous for focus: doing steel properly, investing billions of dollars in the Dung Quat integrated steel complex to close the production chain. Hoa Phat became Vietnam's largest steelmaker and Long has appeared on the Forbes billionaire list for years.

In 1988, mathematician-physicist Truong Gia Binh and 12 fellow scientists founded FPT with virtually no capital - early revenue came from trading computers and even drying bananas. The turning point was the late-1990s decision to export software, when nobody in the world believed "Vietnam can do software".

FPT persistently opened offices in India, the US and Japan - failing repeatedly before Japan became its golden market. Today FPT operates in nearly 30 countries with billion-dollar technology services revenue, and is betting next on AI and semiconductors - true to its founder's "one beat ahead" style.

While running Bac A Bank, Thai Huong pivoted into dairy in 2009 after the melamine milk crisis - convinced that Vietnamese consumers deserved internationally clean fresh milk. TH true MILK invested directly in concentrated high-tech dairy farms in Nghe An, among Asia's largest at the time.

The "clean fresh milk from the farm" strategy forced the entire industry to become transparent about origins - a shove that reset market standards. She has since expanded the high-tech agriculture model to Russia and other markets.

A mechanical engineering graduate in 1983, he started with manual labor in an auto repair workshop - he still retells the "scraping grease" story as his first life lesson. In 1997 he founded Thaco in Dong Nai, climbing from repairs to assembling trucks and buses, then partnering to assemble Kia, Mazda and Peugeot at the Chu Lai industrial complex.

Thaco became Vietnam's largest private auto company before he pivoted again into large-scale agriculture (taking over HAGL's agriculture arm) - applying industrial discipline to farming. Forbes has recognized him as a USD billionaire since 2018.