SMALL BEGINNINGS
VNG was born in 2004 as Vinagame, a start-up with just five people, who prepared the launch of their – and Vietnam’s – first online game by travelling the country on motorcycles.
They plastered posters for the game across 5,000 internet cafes, the founders say.
They have now moved on to fintech and AI, with a mission to show the world what Vietnam – one of the world’s fastest-growing economies – and its engineers are capable of.
But games remain a big part of the business plan, with 80 per cent of revenue still earned in that division.
Publishing around 10 games a year in Vietnam and in various parts of Southeast Asia including Thailand and Indonesia, they are trying to expand further afield, into Latin America and the Middle East, where they also want to push games they make in-house.
“It is a natural progression,” said Lisa Hanson, CEO of Niko Partners, an Asian games market intelligence firm, noting that Singapore’s Sea, a gaming and e-commerce company, had found success in South Asia and the Middle East with mobile game Free Fire.
Two years before Minh co-founded Vinagame, he travelled from what was then still a poor and underdeveloped Vietnam to play e-sports at one of the first World Cyber Games, held in Daejeon, South Korea in 2002.
“I still remember the emotion. I said to myself this is the pinnacle of my career as a gamer,” he said.
“The ultimate goal of anyone any good is to … play with the best people in the world, right?”
He has that same aim for VNG, he says, which as Vietnam’s first billion-dollar start-up is pitching its “homegrown digital ecosystem” to investors across the globe.