
Founded VNG in 2004, Le Hong Minh initiated the company for his love of gaming. Being a passionate gamers since the earliest days of computer gaming didn’t lead him to became a game developer. Instead he studied and graduated with a finance degree in Australia. He then worked as a banker for three years.
From VinaGame to digital company VNG
No longer able to ignore his love for game, Minh resigned and build VNG, which was VInaGame at the time. Now, it transforms into a digital company that does not just launch games. It also has a media and social networking platform as well as cashless payments.
VNG was listed as Vietnam’s first unicorn that valued up to $1 billion. After developing only games, it launched Zing Me, a social network platform with 4 million monthly active users in 2003. Four years later, it launched a free mobile messaging application, Zalo. Now, Zalo has more than 100 million users from around the world.
In 2016, VNG launched Zalopay, a mobile cashless payment platform. The cashless payment system was not the first for the company. Previously, it had ZIngpay, which was a cashless payment system for gamers. VNG also announced its’ plan on making Zalopay available in other Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand.
One of the unicorns of Southeast Asia
Not just in Southeast Asia, VNG also took a step to America. In 2017, it signed an MOU with Nasdaq. The world’s second largest stock exchange agreed to help VNG explore the US listing.
Being called the Vietnam version of Tencent, the company also recorded a lot of awards for its achievements. The World Startup Record put the company on the list as the first and only unicorn startup in Vietnam. It is also on the list of 9 technology unicorns in Southeast Asia along with Grab and Go-jek per Google and Temasek.