Nguyễn Thị Phương Thảo built Vietnam’s largest domestic airline and one of its biggest private banks from a trading fortune made in Moscow before she was twenty-five. Vietjet, launched in 2011, overtook the flag carrier on domestic routes within six years and listed in 2017, making her the first self-made female billionaire in Southeast Asia. HDBank, where she is vice-chair, has grown into a top-tier private lender and in 2025 absorbed the failed DongA Bank. The distinctive feature of her Sovico group is that each business is designed to fund itself, in contrast to the cross-subsidy model of the country’s largest conglomerate.
Nguyễn Thị Phương Thảo is the clearest example in Vietnam of a founder who made money in the former Soviet bloc and then chose sectors, aviation and banking, where scale, regulation and capital discipline mattered more than land. Her airline is the country’s most-flown carrier, her bank is among the largest private lenders, and her holding company sits behind both. This article traces how she got there, how the businesses are connected and what the model offers to founders working in regulated industries. It is part of the Vietnam Company Stories hub.
Where did the seed capital come from?
From trading electronics, fax machines, rubber and consumer goods between Asia and the Soviet Union while she was a student in Moscow in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She has said she had her first million dollars by the age of twenty-one.
What does Sovico own?
Controlling or significant stakes in Vietjet Air, HDBank, a portfolio of hotels and resorts including the Furama properties, an energy arm and property developments. Sovico itself is unlisted; Vietjet and HDBank are listed on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange.
Why does the model differ from Vingroup’s?
Because Vietjet and HDBank are regulated businesses that raise their own capital from aircraft lessors and depositors, and neither has been used as a cash source for the other. The holding company owns the equity; the operating companies carry their own funding.
How did a Vietnamese student in Moscow make her first fortune?
By trading whatever the Soviet consumer lacked and the Asian factory could supply. Thảo, born in Hanoi in 1970, went to Moscow at seventeen to study finance and economics at the Plekhanov institute, and later took a doctorate in economic cybernetics. Almost immediately she began importing goods from Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea and selling them into a Soviet market short of everything.
The trade began with fax machines, electronics and latex rubber and widened into clothing, agricultural commodities and steel. She has described working eighteen-hour days between lectures, and by her own account had earned her first million dollars by twenty-one, an unusual claim that is nonetheless consistent with the scale of Vietnamese trading networks in the late Soviet period. Fellow students in the same networks, Phạm Nhật Vượng among them, built comparable positions in Ukraine and Russia, a story told in the Vingroup founder’s profile.
The difference in her case was the early move into finance. With her husband, Nguyễn Thanh Hùng, she founded Sovico in Moscow in the early 1990s as a trading and investment vehicle, and the couple were among the early private shareholders in Techcombank and VIB when Vietnam licensed its first joint-stock banks in the mid-1990s. The pattern of using trading profits to buy positions in regulated, licence-protected businesses would define everything that followed.
Why did she decide to build an airline in a country with one state carrier?
Because by the mid-2000s Vietnam had a growing middle class, one of the fastest-growing air travel markets in Asia and a single flag carrier that priced flights beyond most households. Low-cost carriers had already transformed Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Thảo studied AirAsia, Ryanair and Southwest and concluded that the same model would work in a country of ninety million people with a long, thin geography.
Vietjet received its licence in 2007, the first for a private airline in Vietnam, but did not fly until December 2011. The delay reflected the financial crisis, an abandoned partnership with AirAsia that the regulator declined to approve, and the difficulty of assembling aircraft, crews and slots from nothing. When the first Airbus A320 took off from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, the flag carrier and its low-cost subsidiary Jetstar Pacific controlled almost the entire domestic market.
Within six years Vietjet had the largest share of domestic passengers. The tools were familiar from other low-cost carriers, a single aircraft family, high utilisation, ancillary revenue from bags and meals, promotional fares as low as a few dollars, and an aggressive marketing approach that included flight attendants in bikinis on inaugural flights, which earned a regulatory fine and a great deal of international attention. What set the airline apart was its use of aircraft orders as a financial instrument. Vietjet placed orders for 100 Airbus A321neos in 2016 and 200 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in stages, then sold and leased back the delivered aircraft, booking gains that contributed a substantial share of reported profits in the years before the pandemic. The airline’s operating history, including the pandemic losses and recovery, is examined in the Vietjet company story.
How does HDBank fit alongside the airline?
As the second leg of the group and, over time, the larger one by assets. Sovico became a strategic shareholder in Ho Chi Minh City Development Bank, a small lender established in 1990, in the late 2000s and Thảo became its vice-chair. HDBank absorbed DaiABank in 2013 and acquired the consumer finance company later branded HD Saison in partnership with Japan’s Credit Saison, giving it a fast-growing unsecured lending arm.
The bank listed on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange in January 2018, attracting a group of foreign institutions in a pre-listing placement, and has since grown its balance sheet to several hundred trillion dong. Its return on equity has been consistently among the highest of the listed private banks, helped by consumer finance margins and by lending to the small and medium-sized businesses clustered around its southern base. In 2025 the State Bank of Vietnam transferred DongA Bank, a lender placed under special control in 2015, to HDBank as part of the compulsory rescue programme that also handed other failed banks to Vietcombank, MB and VPBank. HDBank relaunched it under the Vikki brand as a digital bank. The mechanics of those forced rescues, and what an acquiring bank receives in return, are set out in Vietnam’s bad-debt machine.
The link between the airline and the bank is deliberately limited. HDBank provides ordinary banking services to Vietjet and co-brands a credit card, but Vietnamese banking rules cap lending to related parties, and the bank’s disclosures show aviation as a small part of its loan book. Thảo has said that the two businesses were built to stand on their own, and their separate listings mean that shareholders in each can see the accounts of one without the other.
What does the rest of Sovico look like?
A collection of hotels, resorts, property developments and energy assets, mostly unlisted and financed by asset sales and bank borrowing rather than by the airline or the bank. Sovico owns the Furama Resort in Đà Nẵng, acquired from a foreign owner in 2005, and the Ariyana convention complex beside it, along with hotels in Khánh Hòa and Phú Quốc, and the L’Alya resort in Nha Trang.
Property development runs through Sovico’s real-estate arm, which has developed the Dragon City complex in Ho Chi Minh City and holds land in Phú Quốc and along the central coast. An energy arm holds stakes in petroleum distribution and has announced solar and gas ambitions. None of these businesses is individually large by the standards of the listed property developers; together they give the group a base of hard assets and a reason to be present in provincial negotiations.
The most visible use of the holding company’s wealth outside Vietnam was a pledge in 2021 of £155 million to Linacre College at the University of Oxford, which proposed to rename itself Thao College. The gift drew political scrutiny in Britain and, according to subsequent reporting, the bulk of the money had not arrived several years later, leaving the renaming unrealised. The episode says something about the ambitions of Vietnam’s new wealth and about the gap between announcements and completed transfers that runs through the region’s corporate philanthropy.
How did the pandemic test the model?
Severely, and in a way that showed both its strengths and its weaknesses. Vietjet reported its first annual loss in 2020, kept flying through domestic reopening in 2021 and 2022 and turned to cargo, aircraft trading and a wider international network to recover. It returned to profit in 2023 and 2024, while the flag carrier needed a state-backed rescue and Bamboo Airways collapsed under its founder’s legal troubles, a contrast drawn in the Bamboo Airways story.
The weakness that the pandemic exposed was the dependence on sale-and-leaseback gains. With aircraft deliveries delayed and lessors cautious, that income shrank, and Vietjet’s core airline economics, thin margins on domestic fares and a heavy fixed lease burden, became visible. The airline also faced a dispute with a lessor over four aircraft repossessed during the pandemic, which reached the English courts and resulted in a large judgment against Vietjet in 2024, a reminder that international aircraft finance is governed by contracts that do not bend to local circumstances.
HDBank, by contrast, grew through the pandemic. Credit growth continued under the State Bank’s quota system, the consumer finance arm recovered quickly, and the bank’s profit reached record levels in 2023 and 2024. The two-leg structure, in which the bank did not have to bail out the airline and the airline did not drain the bank, performed as intended.
How does she keep control across a listed airline and a listed bank?
Through Sovico and a small number of affiliated companies that together hold controlling or blocking positions, and through her own board roles. Thảo is president and chief executive of Vietjet and vice-chair of HDBank, while her husband chairs Sovico. Foreign ownership in both companies is capped by law, at 30 percent for a bank and 34 percent for an airline, which limits the possibility of an outside shareholder building a rival position.
Forbes put her net worth at roughly $1.7 billion when it first listed her in 2017, the first Vietnamese woman to appear on the billionaires list and the first self-made female billionaire from Southeast Asia. The figure has moved between about $2 billion and $3 billion since, tracking Vietjet and HDBank shares. Unlike some Vietnamese founders, she has not pledged large blocks of shares to fund adjacent ventures, and the group has avoided the corporate-bond binge that brought down several property groups in 2022.
The other instrument of control is diplomatic. Vietjet’s aircraft orders have been signed in the presence of American, French and Vietnamese heads of state, and the airline is the most prominent Vietnamese customer of both Boeing and Airbus. That gives Thảo a role in trade relations, particularly during the tariff negotiations of 2025, when Vietnamese purchases of American aircraft became part of the government’s offer to Washington. The founder of an airline in a small country can matter to trade policy in a way that the founder of a supermarket chain cannot.
What does Thảo’s career mean for founders and investors?
For founders, the lesson is that the most durable private fortunes in a transition economy have been built in sectors protected by licences and capital requirements, where the number of competitors is limited by the state and where a first-mover with capital can hold a position for decades. Aviation and banking are the two clearest examples in Vietnam, and Thảo entered both before the market was obvious.
A second lesson concerns structure. By keeping Vietjet and HDBank as separately listed companies with their own funding, she has given each a valuation, a set of outside shareholders and an independent access to capital, which is very different from the internal cross-subsidy that characterises Vingroup and the state conglomerates described in State Giants and Private Empires. When one leg stumbled in 2020, the other did not have to catch it.
For investors, the caution is that both businesses remain founder-directed to an unusual degree, that related-party transactions between the airline, the bank and the unlisted parts of Sovico require careful reading, and that Vietjet’s reported earnings have historically depended on financing gains whose timing the company controls. The stock has rewarded patience on the whole but has been volatile, and minority shareholders have limited influence over a group whose strategy is set by two people.
What comes next for Sovico?
The stated ambition is to turn Vietjet into a regional carrier and to build HDBank into one of Vietnam’s top three private banks. Vietjet has ordered wide-body Airbus A330neos for long-haul routes, expanded a Thai affiliate, opened services to India, Australia and Kazakhstan, and continued to add A321neos from an order enlarged again in 2025. Whether long-haul low-cost flying works from Vietnam, a model that has failed in several other markets, is the next test.
HDBank’s integration of DongA Bank, its push into digital banking under the Vikki brand and its exposure to the recovery of the property market will determine whether the bank can keep its high returns as it grows. The State Bank’s credit-quota system rewards banks that take on rescue duties with larger lending allowances, which is one reason a founder with an airline to fund might accept a failed bank.
The wider question is succession. Thảo is in her mid-fifties and her husband is older; their son Tommy Nguyễn has been given roles within the group. No Vietnamese private conglomerate of the first generation has yet completed a transfer of control, and the first to do so will set a precedent for the rest.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Nguyễn Thị Phương Thảo?
A Vietnamese entrepreneur born in Hanoi in 1970 who made an early fortune trading goods in Moscow, co-founded Sovico Holdings with her husband and went on to found Vietjet Air and become vice-chair of HDBank. In 2017 Forbes named her the first self-made female billionaire in Southeast Asia.
How much of Vietjet does she own?
Directly and through Sovico and affiliated companies, she and her family have controlled roughly a third to a half of Vietjet’s shares since the 2017 listing, with the balance held by domestic and foreign institutions and retail investors. Foreign ownership in Vietnamese airlines is capped at 34 percent.
Is HDBank part of Vietjet?
No. Both are separately listed companies in which Sovico holds a strategic stake. HDBank provides ordinary banking services to Vietjet and co-brands a credit card, but related-party lending is capped by Vietnamese banking rules and aviation is a small part of the bank’s loan book.
What happened with the Oxford donation?
In 2021 Sovico pledged £155 million to Linacre College, Oxford, which proposed to rename itself Thao College. The pledge drew political scrutiny in Britain and, according to later reporting, most of the funds had not been transferred several years afterwards, leaving the renaming unrealised.
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