'Beyond our borders': Vietnam tech firm VNG takes on world best

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — VNG co-founder Le Hong Minh's first taste of international competition was as a gamer for Vietnam at an early e-sport tournament in South Korea.

Two decades later, he says he's ready to face the world's best again as he takes his tech company public.

The firm -- headquartered in buzzing business hub Ho Chi Minh City -- is one of Vietnam's leading game publishers, but it also runs a digital wallet, cloud services and Vietnam's most popular messaging platform.

Months after Vietnamese electric vehicle maker VinFast made its debut on the Nasdaq, hitting the headlines around the world as its valuation skyrocketed and then crashed, VNG is also planning a listing in New York.

"I challenge the game team by saying that in the next three to five years we need to become a global game company," Minh, 46, told AFP from his office on the banks of the Saigon river.

To do that, "we need to be on a global stage, with access to global capital and talent".

In Vietnam, VNG's products are already deeply embedded in people's lives.

Its Zalo app has 75 million active users in a country of 100 million people, outperforming Facebook to make it Vietnam's most popular messaging platform.

The communist nation has a young and tech-savvy population, but it's not just them who use Zalo, whose default language is Vietnamese and which is tailored to the domestic market.

"Zalo is very convenient to use for us," Ha Thi Minh Hoan, 74, told AFP. "As we are old, we stay at home more and we use Zalo for communication. We share photos, chat, have fun with each other.

"If there is no Zalo, life may be a bit boring and monotonous I think."

VNG was born in 2004 as Vinagame, a start-up with just five people, who prepared the launch of their -- and Vietnam's -- first online game by travelling the country on motorcycles.

They plastered posters for the game across 5,000 internet cafes, the founders say.

They have now moved on to fintech and AI, with a mission to show the world what Vietnam -- one of the world's fastest growing economies -- and its engineers are capable of.

But games remain a big part of the business plan, with 80 percent of revenue still earned in that division.

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