Tai opened his first such outlet in Ho Chi Minh City in 2016, selling vegetables, meat and fish with clearly labeled origins, and other essential items such as noodles and drinks.
International News » When Nguyen Duc Tai, the son of a street vendor, said he was going to revolutionize Vietnam’s mobile phone industry, few people gave it a second thought.
“Everybody laughed at me,” says Tai of that time in 2009.
But Tai was true to this word. His Mobile World Investment Corp. became the country’s top seller of mobile phones and one of the biggest listed stocks. The company now has a market value of $1.7 billion.
So when Tai said that he was going to overhaul the country’s food industry, this time people listened. “The future of groceries is very clear,” a t-shirted Tai, 49, said in an interview in Ho Chi Minh City. “It’s not a question of whether I succeed or not. It’s a matter of how long it takes.”
Tai’s success as an entrepreneur has come from trying to modernize Vietnam. For mobile phones, he opened what he says was the first high-street chain where customers could have a sense of security about the devices’ quality and origins. And in the world of food shopping, he’s trying to replace Vietnam’s traditional wet markets with grocery stores.
Tai opened his first such outlet in Ho Chi Minh City in 2016, selling vegetables, meat and fish with clearly labeled origins, and other essential items such as noodles and drinks. In wet markets, food is sold outdoors in venues that aren’t always clean. Buyers don’t necessarily know where it comes from, and the prices aren’t fixed.
376 Stores
The chain — called Bachhoaxanh — now has 376 stores in the city.
“Our dream is to take 10 per cent of the $60 billion grocery market by 2022,” Tai said. That would be twice his company’s almost $3 billion in revenue last year.
Of course, Tai has been down a similar road before. Fifteen years ago, a global mobile phone boom had skipped Vietnam, because handsets were too expensive.
“At that time, only executives or rich people could buy a cell phone,” Tai said. “Owning one seemed impossible to many people, and I thought we needed to do something to change that.”
So in 2003, he quit his job as a strategic director at a phone company to start his own business. He opened three stores in small alleys in Ho Chi Minh City, but they failed after a few months because of their locations and inability to win customers’ trust, Tai said.
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