Flying happy

Since launching Vietnam’s only private airline, VietJet, in 2011, founder and chief executive Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao has fast become the queen of Asia’s skies. At the surprisingly young age, for an airline boss, of 45, her ambition is boundless. And so far there’s nothing to suggest she won’t achieve her goals.

It really all started in Moscow in the late 1980s when Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao was a secondyear student studying finance and economics. With little money during those years not long before the Soviet Union collapsed, Thao’s entrepreneurial spirit came to the fore. She persuaded suppliers in Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea to let her have clothing, office equipment and other consumer goods on credit. Then she sold them to a Russian public eager to snap up goods that were in short supply in an economically depressed Soviet Union.

“I worked so hard and earned the trust of suppliers by always being honest with them,” she explained later. “I didn’t have much money. They gave me more and more products with longer credit terms.”