What drove EY to invest in Vietnam 30 years ago?
Quote by Lenard Xieu Tan, Founder, Managing Partner, Ernst & Young Indochina
Dear big EY Indochina Family!
The story of EY Indochina is the story of a small startup persevering in the face of overwhelming odds to build the foundation of the great EY Indochina of today.
Mai Anita (Lenard Xieu Tan’s spouse) and I would like to applaud our big EY Indochina family for its success. Our history started in 1988 in a small office in Ho Chi Minh city with just two members. At the time, Vietnam was still under the US embargo. We opened our Hanoi office in a small room at the Government’s guest house with four members, among them your current Country Managing Partner, my great colleague and friend: Cuong Dinh Tran. Vietnamese people are unparalleled in their dynamism and the country has a great strategic position. Being adjacent to China, having a long coastline and less than a two-hour flight from Hong Kong and Singapore, we had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop the financial market under Doi Moi. Then and now, Vietnam needs to have a solid, independent accounting and auditing services industry to support its growth and face its challenges head-on.
To enable this independence, it was crucial to leverage the strength of a trusted business partner who is a leader in the field. EY Vietnam was born through close collaboration and relations with EY Hong Kong and through them EY Singapore and EY Australia, cementing the 100% buy-in from the EYGlobal.
This partnership brought a readily available global client base. From the very start, business is about relations and trust. Through our partnership and talks with EY Hong Kong, we brought the global weight of the firm and matched it with local strength to foster trust and create a leading-class auditing and accounting offering. This is not to say that the start was without difficulty. We fought to make the firm financially viable, drawing upon our client base and personal investments to make it successful. We fought for several years before we obtained our SCCI (State Committee on Cooperation and Investment) license and outlived the US embargo. We fought and advocated to build a strong local team without bringing in overseas teams to run the operation.
Through all this, EY Vietnam became the leading firm in the market. We were the first accounting firm with a full-service operation license under the representative office license from the Ministry of Commerce and the first accounting firm to be licensed by the SCCI. We bet on Cuong, sending him to the US, investing in his growth and creating the strong Managing Partner and Chairman of EY Indochina that he is today.
My belief is that when you’re following your inner voice, doors will open for you even if they were closed on you before. If you are analyzing and auditing a business, you need to understand how it works, how it flows and how to make it work for your audit. Also, never forget that you must work on the business before it works for you. The core values are the glue that will hold the business together. Business value will allow you to soar above the competition.
Not only has EY Vietnam performed exceedingly well in the market, but the firm has also played an important role in the evolution of Vietnam following the Doi Moi. Specifically, we created our impact via:
- Facilitating the change of Foreign Investment Law to allow foreign investors to become 100% foreign-invested companies
- The establishment of the Assurance services
- Assisting with the establishment of the Vietnamese stock market
- Supporting the privatization and reforms of SOEs and many other various roles.
Just remember: Success is not final, and failure is not fatal. Having the courage to pioneer and continue should be the principle to have! The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph!
Taking this opportunity, I am very proud and happy that our EY family continues as one of the leading accounting and consulting firms in Indochina, and would like to send my warm wishes for continued success for many years to come.