Forbes Asia - May 2018

Girding

for Growth

A

lthough a state steel company

got going in what was then

the communist North in 1960,

Vietnam has never had a really

huge integrated manufacturing

plant—until now. When it opens later this

year, the $3 billion steelworks in the Dung

Quat Economic Zone, near a deepwater port

in Central Vietnam, will serve a modernized

economy that as late as 2015 had to rely on

mostly Chinese imports of heavy, rolled steel.

his milestone is the handiwork of another

Vietnamese newsmaker: new billionaire

Tran Dinh Long, chairman of Hoa Phat

Group, which is already the country’s biggest

steelmaker by market share. he 57-year-old

Tran was a construction ministry stafer when

he and a half-dozen university chums formed

a building-supply outit in 1992, as the nation

reopened to international commerce. Soon

Hoa Phat branched into oice furniture and

then into producing steel piping for such

ware. It IPO’d as a metals company in 2007.

Ten years later, its revenues reached $2 billion

(a 38% yearly jump) with net proit of $350

million, and the rising shares have driven

Long’s one-third stake to $1.3 billion.

Today there’s plenty of steelmaking in

Vietnam as urbanization (now 34% of the

population) creates greater structural needs

and government trade policy supports the

domestic sector. But none of the other private

or state players can match Hoa Phat’s scope.

Last year it sold 3 million tons of construction

steel, and the Dung Quat factory will better

than double that capacity. To that and its pipes

production, Hoa Phat is adding galvanized-

steel lines. he company’s workforce has

doubled in a year to 15,000 as it ramps up for

the launches.

Tran’s outit has been a big part of displac-

ing the Chinese steel that looded Vietnam

(and global markets) ater the inancial crisis

of 2008, when China—which now has half

the world’s volume—kept its mills humming.

Hoa Phat expanded in the face of that ater

Vietnam entered the WTO in 2007. Now it

has 25% of Vietnam’s market and has begun

to export to Southeast Asia. “If Vietnam is

a body, Hoa Phat is a cell. he development

of Hoa Phat, as well as the steel industry in

Vietnam, is based on the need to grow of a

developing country,” Tran says in an interview

with Forbes in his new oice, in a high-rise

built with his steel, looking over hien Quang

lake in the heart of Hanoi.

he days of hustling equipment and

materials to construction sites 25 years ago

FORBES ASIA

TRAN DINH LONG

Construction boom paves the way for a

Vietnamese steelmaker—and new billionaire.

BY LAN ANH NGUYEN

26 | FORBES ASIA MAY 2018

Tran is one of only four

Vietnamese billionaires.