One of my favourite days of the years is International Women’s Day on March 8, or Ngày Quốc Tế Phụ Nữ as we call it here in Vietnam. It’s an opportunity to celebrate women the world over and not least the most important ones in my life: my mother, my sister and all my female friends… [Read the full article]
Category: Local
Why Vietnamese consumers think healthy products are the cat’s whiskers
It is Tết Nguyên Đán, the lunar New Year here in Vietnam and in 2023 we are ushering in the year of the water cat (we have a different tradition to China, which is celebrating the year of the rabbit). A cat feels like an apt analogy for how Vietnamese consumer habits are changing. In… [Read the full article]
Combating unethical business practices
In a recent blog post, I wrote about the reassuring findings of Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer. It found that, globally, trust in business is growing because people view companies as a reliable and credible source of information in the fake news era. I also wrote about how THP views trust as the core part of… [Read the full article]
Why informality not hierarchy is the watchword for Vietnamese business
One issue that often confounds Westerners when they come to visit us at THP is the gulf between their pre-conceived notions about the way that Asians value hierarchy and what they perceive happening on the ground. In some ways, this is very understandable. It is well known that Vietnam is a Confucian society. This is… [Read the full article]
Being a Teacher
Each year since 1982, we have celebrated Teacher’s Day on November 20th here in Vietnam. It is a chance for students, past and present, to show respect and admiration for the teachers among us. And one of our most famous sayings about education always reminds me of my father and his great childhood friend Uncle… [Read the full article]
Women at Work
At THP, we teach everyone that, “Nothing is Impossible.” It is the very spirit of our company. But unfortunately, it still remains true that when it comes to gender equality, too many women find that there are barriers in place to their advancement. Some of these barriers are visible. A Vietnamese job advertisement may stipulate… [Read the full article]
Mùa Vu Lan – Vietnamese Mother Appreciation Month
If you are lucky enough to be visiting Vietnam this August, you may see a number of people wearing roses on their shirts or blouses. Some will be wearing red roses and some will be wearing white. The different colours signify whether the wearer’s mother is alive (red) or has passed on (white). These flowers… [Read the full article]
Re-thinking our use of plastic
When it comes to environmental sustainability, we all know that we need to do a lot more to reduce our plastic consumption. The responsibility falls on us as consumers and as companies. It is an issue, which the Vietnamese government takes extremely seriously and one that THP wholeheartedly supports. In recent years, the government has… [Read the full article]
How Vietnam’s Future is Benefiting from Its “Global” Citizens
Vietnam’s future is becoming increasingly bright; it is a sentiment shared by its people. Pew Research Center found some 88 percent of Vietnamese people polled believe the country is better off than fifty years before. There is a growing sense of pride and desire to continue the momentum of success by all of its citizens… [Read the full article]
The Potential Pitfalls of Global-Localization
As I have discussed at great length in other articles, a company’s ability to produce locally focused products and services is often a key to its success. Multinationals know this, which is why for decades, global companies have worked to achieve a local feel in each of the markets they operate in – a phenomenon… [Read the full article]
