CEO of Vietnam’s biggest e-commerce site reveals his secrets to success (INTERVIEW)

Vietnam has one of the most bullish e-commerce markets in the region. A report from the Vietnam E-Commerce and Information Technology Agency (VECITA) found that 57 percent of the Vietnamese population has bought goods or services online. 96 percent of Vietnamese people sees buying goods online as normal. By VECITA’s previous estimates, the e-commerce market is currently worth $700 million and will grow to $1.3 billion by 2015.

Leading the growth of this market are e-commerce sites like VC Corp, VNG, Rocket Internet, Tiki, and Vat Gia. But of this group, Vat Gia is most well known for its B2B and B2C e-commerce services and has played a decisive role in making e-commerce acceptable and widespread in Vietnam. Vat Gia is considered by some to be worth up to $75 million and may be, prior to the arrival of Rocket Internet, Southeast Asia’s largest e-commerce company.

The first six months in Vat Gia

We conducted a long interview with the CEO of Vat Gia, Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Diep, who started the company in 2006 after a trip to Japan.

At that time, in Japan, e-commerce was really taking off. For one year, I saw how the Japanese websites were growing so fast and asked, why don’t we have such websites in Vietnam?

It was with this curiosity and passion that inspired Diep to come back to Vietnam and start Vat Gia. He secured an initial angel investment of $200,000 (from IDGVV) and, with no knowledge of IT, no experience in operations management, no experience working with investors, and no connections, started his company.

During those early days, our entire team was made up of people who didn’t graduate from university and didn’t have any industry-specific skills. And yet, we all were burning with the fire to build an e-commerce site like an eBay, Amazon, Taobao, or Rakuten. We all put our heads down and worked and learned.

His team blew away the entire $200,000 in the first six months of operation. Despite this, by the end of 2009, his company won out. It is still the market leader in e-commerce in Vietnam.

Beating competitors to a pulp

In an interview with Thanh Nien news in 2012, Diep stated outright, "if an international company like eBay attempted to enter a complex market like Vietnam, it would definitely lose to me.” It’s this confidence and understanding of the Vietnamese market that allowed Vat Gia to go up against twenty different competitors in the space in the mid–2000’s. At least ten of these competitors had foreign companies backing them. But when it comes to methodologies, Diep says it was quite humble:

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