Press Release

Born in a family that his father is an army officer and mother is a teacher, Binh does not continue his father or mother’s career. The development of information technology attracted this high land little boy.

About in the mid 1995, Da Lat began to establish some computer training centers with computers of version 286. Students could practice MSDOS, Viettre, and Norton Commander on floppy disks because their teachers were afraid that they could damage the hard disks. In 1996, Binh applied for a job at newly open computer science center as free of charge assistant. Until 1997, he passed the entrance exam to the HCM City University of Polytechnic and he chose I.T major.

To earn money to buy a computer and to challenge him, Binh and his friends tried to do business as a florist and opened a home teacher office. On every February 14, March 8, November 20, Binh and his friends bought roses from Da Lat and transported to HCM City to retail in return for profits. The money he earned was just enough for daily expenses, fails to help him become rich! So, in 2000, he turned to distribute and sell wholesale: buying flowers from Da Lat and then distributing them to some flower shops in Saigon. “On an occasion, the whole group decided to make a big deal: buying flowers many days ahead, using some flower nutritious substances and loaded on trucks to transport to HCM City, but the shops refused to buy all. Losing money, they had to close their flower shop and home teacher office!” said Binh.

After the first failure in business arena, Binh did not seem to lose his heart but continued to do business. But he turned to another field which was suitable with him; it was Information technology.  

Binh and his friends make a group to develop website in HCM City. The group analyzed that to penetrate into the field like software or to process soft wares now was not feasible because of lack of capital, relationship, and partners. At that time, the field that was “tapped” by few people was website design. Developing website takes less time than writing software; although it was hard to customers, it required less capital. In addition, all of us were young, dynamic and keen on designing, taking photos, listening to music, so our website were very beautiful, friendly and inexpensive.

In 2002, when having some experience, Binh and his friends established a company called Mat Bao, specializing in website design with only 3 computers. The collected capital was only 15 million dong. In that year, we did not sit and wait for customers; we introduced a shocking promotion program “designing website free of charge.” With a charge of only US$ 72 for annual maintenance, you had a website. So, many businesses responded at once.

Although the number of customers was increasing, we could not “live” on online services and designing websites because more and more website designing companies came into existence. We decided to turn to providing infrastructure services, which means to create more value added services like providing domain, hosting, email… The customers of these services are those that are as same as our company before. This business is also less competitive.

Binh said, “developing website at least could help us earn as much as 5 – 10 million dong/website, whereas, lease hosting can only get 15.000 dong/month like collecting coins. Everyone does not want to collect coins; I feel it is wasteful, so I collect. This way is strange and immense, so Mat Bao has developed, despite some difficulties about staff that left, though confidential at the beginning, the company.”

“Presently, there are 19 million people (accounting for about 21, 66%) using internet. I try to get as much as 1.000 dong/month from each of them!” said Binh, “That is the money collected from providing online services for internet users. Just imagine that spending 1.000 dong/month listening to “copyrighted – legal – quality” songs, many people will agree with that because at least they feel proud among his friend that they listen to copyrighted songs! 1.000 dong/month can prove that you respect the legality. I think no one feels it a waste of money.”

“Some internet users find it hard to make payments through internet; it does not mean that internet services do not have customers,” said Binh. “People always do this: selling cards while listening to music, watching films, then going to buy a card, which loses your interests! Or collecting money through banks, post offices costs about 30.000 – 50.000 dong/each time. So annoying! The payment solution through mobile phone can help to get rid of this annoyance. And at that time, people surely pay.” Mat Bao has focused on investing, constructing and developing SMS Gateway – a solution to provide change payment service “anywhere – anytime.” This solution is to collect from 1.000 dong – 5.000 dong, depending on the kind of service (e.g. listening to music : 3.000 dong/month, watching films :5.000 dong/month…) Wherever you are, you can pay your online service charges simply by sending messages to pay through mobile phones. This system will automatically collect the charges from your mobile phone’s account.

According to Hai Binh, young people should “dare think, dare do”, but “dare think” means that you think of something new, cool and consider that thinking, then “dare do it.” It does mean thinking vaguely, then “dare do it”. It is not acceptable!”

Hopefully, this young director shall have more “schemes” to succeed in his own way.