Born in June 1970 when U.S. troops were still in Vietnam, Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao went to school in Moscow. While there, she created a business importing goods from Vietnam and other South East Asian countries and selling them in the Soviet Union. She quickly became a millionaire. When she returned to Vietnam in the early 1990s, she invested her wealth in real estate development projects and commercial banking.
She started VietJet in 2007, the first private Vietnamese airline company. VietJet now serves 23 domestic and 10 international destinations and carried its 25 millionth passenger on December 5, 2015. She announced earlier this year plans to take the company public.
An extraordinary entrepreneur, Bloomberg estimates that Thao’s wealth will soon exceed $1 billion based on her ownership stake in VietJet and her real estate holdings in Ho Chi-Min City.
For more on her amazing story, check out this Bloomberg article. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-23/how-bikini-airline-helped-to-create-vietnam-s-first-woman-billionaire
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