When unknown Asian brands are able to penetrate the global market and become world-class, I put my attention more on how they do it. Not many people in Southeast Asia know about VinFast, a Vietnam-based car manufacturer. And not many people here know that VinFast has already sent its first batch of EV cars to the United States. That’s right. They are now preparing to send another batch there soon.
Vinfast
What is VinFast? Well, according to Wikipedia, VinFast LLC is a Vietnamese private automotive company based in Haiphong. Established in 2017, it is a member of the conglomerate organization Vingroup, one of the largest private conglomerates in Vietnam, founded by Phạm Nhật Vượng.
When a Southeast Asian car brand such as VinFast is able to penetrate western countries, such as the United States and Europe, I believe they truly deserve our respect—big time. It showcases that their quality product is absolutely world-class. This also proves my personal theory that people are indeed looking for quality products to go along with their lifestyles, or to solve their problems.
What do I learn from VinFast’s success? One thing, build a product that has world-class quality. When I say world-class quality, it means that I need to ensure the product itself has the best quality, the services that come along with the product also have the best quality and the user experience too must have top-notch quality.
Coway
I am a person who is extremely careful when it comes to money. Thanks to my parents for showing me the right way of living, I lead a frugal with my lovely wife and children. Despite being careful about daily and monthly expenses, I’ve been subscribing to a couple of products from Coway. And both are costing me as much as MYR200 per month.
What is Coway? According to Wikipedia, Coway Co., Ltd. is an international manufacturer of household appliances, water purifiers and water softeners from South Korea. It is founded and headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, with subsidiaries in a number of Asian countries such as China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. They also have a presence in the United States. The company is listed on the Korea Exchange and is a subsidiary of Netmarble since 2019.
When an extremely frugal person like me somehow subscribed to more than one product from a particular brand, I started to pay attention to what that particular brand is doing right. And it seems that Coway is doing one major thing right—they are making people live life comfortably and affordably. The products they are selling are pretty much needed by the people, yet the price of those products is beyond the means of average salary earners. Not only that, the maintenance and disposal of the products when they expired aren’t easy too. But Coway is making things easy for those three pain points. Today, millions of people are subscribing to Coway in those countries and I am one of them.
Huawei
For “security” reasons, Huawei has been banned by the United States since May 2019, following an executive order from then-President Donald Trump. From its mobile devices right up to computers and telecommunications equipment, the brand is no longer allowed to be used in America. Not just that, US-based companies are also not allowed to supply any parts or services related to Huawei.
According to Android Authority, Huawei is seen to be a de facto branch of the Chinese government. But that may not be just the reason. The telecommunication giant has faced scrutiny from the beginning for allegedly stealing intellectual property. Huawei would be accused repeatedly over the decades of stealing technology from other companies and then passing it off as its own. There are a few times in which this has been proven but there are many other times where accusations didn’t lead to confirmation.
What happened after that is absolutely shocking. Despite the ban, Huawei recently announced that they are now back to normal after more than 3 years of struggling to cope with it. According to several articles published by the China-based media, Huawei is back on its feet thanks to its self-sustainability strategy. And one of the elements within it is that Huawei started to replace their suppliers and source more than 13,000 parts needed for their devices locally. They also redesigned more than 4,000 circuit boards too to ensure this strategy is going to be successful. And they did it. Based on Ren Zhengfei’s remark, this is crucial to ensure that Huawei will no longer be blocked by any party to access advanced technologies.
This development truly surprises me and it strikes my thinking on one thing—do not rely too much on external parties to get things done especially the critical elements of it. Self-sustainability is absolutely crucial.
Conclusion
These are the lessons I learned from these top brands. Reading books can, most of the time, help us build great businesses but again, observing things that are happening out there can truly complement our thinking, especially in refining the strategy we have in mind to grow our businesses. There are many other business stories we can learn out there but these stories from VinFast, Coway and Huawei are absolutely gold for me. They fueled me to think deeper about how best to move forward that probably allowing me to eventually taste success in the next couple of years.
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