War as a formative experience in Vietnam

Hana Dang began life fleeing with her family from the US bombing of Hanoi, capital of North Vietnam. A little over 20 years later, one of her first jobs was to market Coca-Cola.

"That was quite a historic experience," Ms Dang says, recalling how she promoted the soda maker's 1994 return to the unified republic of Vietnam, after the US lifted a longstanding trade embargo. "We were driving a truck around Saigon offering people Coke."

Ms Dang's journey from escapee from Washington's warplanes to cheerleader for American products is part of the textured story of so-called "war babies", many of them women, who are now prominent in Vietnamese business.

After the country's devastating civil conflict ended 40 years ago last week , Ms Dang and her peers drank in the new commercial experiences on offer as the Communist victors opened up to capitalism and foreign investment.

Now Ms Dang's interests range from private equity to film, making her one of a clutch of high-profile female entrepreneurs in this country of 90m people. She sees the war, and the hard years afterwards, as a formative experience, not least because they frayed the edges of male domination of business.

"In the war, a lot of women lost their husbands, so they needed to feed their children," says Ms Dang, 43, whose father died fighting for the North Vietnamese army when she was a year old. "And they became very strong, independent women."

The four-decade anniversary of the fall of the US-backed South Vietnamese regime has focused attention on how much has changed since Viet Cong tanks burst through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, which has since been officially renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam is still a one-party Communist state, but the economy has been thrown open to investment. After a long period in the doldrums, growth is accelerating again, along with debates about inequality, corruption and whether the spirit of Ho Chi Minh's revolution has been trashed.

While much attention has focused lately on the fortunes of one-time refugees now returning to Vietnam to do business, the flipside is those like Ms Dang whose families never left. Nominally on the winning side, they faced harsh years after unification, with Ms Dang recalling how scarce food was. "Everybody was poor," she says. "It was very rare to see people who had money."

After a couple of teenage forays into business start-ups, including setting up a coffee stall outside the family home in Ho Chi Minh City, Ms Dang's first big break came when she took a job as a hotel receptionist to fund her studies to become an English teacher. She caught the eye of visiting executives from foreign companies preparing for the economic opening of Vietnam, eventually landing a job at McCann Erickson, the advertising agency. "They said: 'We need someone like you who has an open personality, can connect well and can speak good English,'" she recalls. "It was very funny at the beginning, because I didn't know what advertising was. I thought they wanted girls to promote beer and cigarettes."

Jobs followed on the accounts of Coke and other western companies entering or re-entering Vietnam, including Maybelline cosmetics. She then moved to Chuo Senko, the Japan-based advertising agency network, then on to work for one of her clients, a pharmaceuticals company, before deciding to develop her own advertising business, called Golden Communication. "I had been on the western side, I had been on the Japanese side, I had been on the client side," she says. "Now it was time to have a local agency building local brands."

Ms Dang recalls the frustration of facing sexism in her early days. Her creative director at Golden was a "2m tall Belgian guy with blond hair and blue eyes" whom "everyone thought . . . was my boss". She says she also lost potential clients because of unfounded "gossip" that she was only picking up contracts because she was good looking. But at other times the prejudice and presumption played to her ultimate advantage. "If they underestimate me, I will win."

Ms Dang's pitch is that she provides the same quality as foreign companies, but at better rates and with greater local insights. She gives as an example that she spotted early the potential for advertising on boats plying the waterways of the Mekong Delta. Golden now has 150 staff and annual sales of about $60m, she says, although she will not give details of profits. "It's not a problem, let's say". She says one of the main constraints on getting bigger is the lack of skilled staff in the country. "We don't have enough performers . . . the people who do the daily operations."

Ms Dang has also branched out, notably as a partner in a $400m local private equity venture of BankInvest of Denmark. She has done an MBA in Chicago and has a production company whose most successful film, a comedy about a poor couple who adopt five street kids, made $3.2m at the box office from a $400,000 investment, she says. She has opened two Thai restaurants with a partner in Ho Chi Minh City - the second last month - and wants to add more outlets in the shopping malls springing up to serve the urban elite.

While Ms Dang is outspoken in some respects, she can also play the diplomat - perhaps a necessary skill in a country where it does not usually pay for businesspeople to antagonise the government. She admits corruption is a "big thing" but declines to give examples of difficult situations that she has faced. She turns the question round, emphasising how she pays her taxes and uses international audit firms.

She also plays down the importance of high-level connections in Vietnamese business, acknowledging they have helped some but saying this is "normal" in every country. She insists her family, which includes uncles who were in the North Vietnamese army and later became factory managers, do not have the level of ties to have helped her career.

Ms Dang moves in a world far from the B-52 raids and privation of her early years. She is working on her Spanish and trying to get her golf handicap below 20. But she has not forgotten her difficult start, not least because she thinks it had a profound impact on what she and others of her age have done since. "It was very tough for my mum and for us also," she says. "Maybe . . . that's why we work harder - and we're more determined to be successful."

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