Who is Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao? One of Asia’s most powerful woman leaders

In the latest annual list for Bloomberg 50 (B50) to honour noteworthy global leaders, President and CEO of Vietjet, Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao was among the leaders named. She is the first ever Vietnamese representative to be mention in the B50 list by Bloomberg Businessweek, one of the world’s leading business and financial publication.

Additionally, she is also ranked 44th place in Forbes’ 100 most powerful women this year. Forbes estimated the self-made billionaire’s assets at around US$2.6 billion, higher than last year’s US$1.98 billion.

Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao is the Southeast Asia’s ONLY billionaire. She is clearly quite an overachiever for someone is is just 48 and from a developing country.

Who is Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao?

Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao is Chairperson of Sovico Holdings, President and CEO of Vietjet, as well as Standing Vice Chairperson of HDBank. She holds two bachelor’s degrees in financial credit management and labour economics at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics and a doctoral degree in economic management at the D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia.

Via Wikipedia, she is said to have met with early success while studying finance and economics in Moscow, where she began distributing goods from Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea in the then Soviet Union. From there, she then developed her portfolio of business interests, including VietJet and Sovico Holdings, that itself holds a 90 per cent stake in Ho Chi Minh City’s Dragon City development.

In 2017 and 2018, she successfully listed Vietjet and HDBank on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange. The market capitalisations of both companies accounted for billions of dollars. She is now the 2nd richest person in the stock market of Vietnam. In addition, she has become a Harvard Business School case study this year.

Watch this interview she did with CNA where she shared on her success journey with Vietjet:

Not much else is known about her private life in the public space, but she did revealed in a CNBC interview that she has a son who was just “a few months old” when she started researching on the low-cost carrier space, before taking on Vietjet.

According to SuperBHub, Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao husband is Dr. Nguyen Thanh Hung, an established Vietnamese businessman.

According to Bloomberg, Dr. Nguyen Thanh Hung is a co-Founder of Sovico Holdings and serves as its Chairman of Management Board. Dr. Hung has been Vice Chairman at VietJet Aviation Joint Stock Company since July 2007 and serves as its Member of Board of Management. He was the first Vietnamese member to joined the Young Global Leaders in 2007 at the Davos World Economic Forum. He has also served on the Asia Pacific Economics Cooperation Business Advisory Council following his appointment by Vietnam’s Prime Minister. Dr. Hung holds an Electrical Engineering degree from Kharkov University and a Ph.D. degree in Cybernetics from the former Soviet Union’s Academy of Science.

The power couple have two children and reside in Hai Ba Trung, Hanoi at present.

2018 Bloomberg 50

The B50 highlights those who have changed the global business landscape in measurable ways in 2018. It now showcases those who changed the equation 2018 in measurable, quantifiable ways thanks to the utilisation of Bloomberg’s worldwide resources of 2,400 journalists, the proprietary data and analytics.

The 2018 B50 honourees include prestigious leaders and entrepreneurs:

• Jerome Powell, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve
• Amy Hood, Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft
• Ben van Beurden, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell
• Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada
• Leanne Caret, President and CEO of Defense, Space & Security at Boeing
• Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa