Dang Thanh Tam’s business got a huge boost from Donald Trump’s first-term trade wars. The tariffs might hurt him this time around, but Dang has an ace up his sleeve: a $1.5 billion luxury project being developed with Trump.
In May, Donald Trump’s son Eric, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, traveled to Vietnam to unveil a new Trump-branded real estate project: the $1.5 billion Trump International Hung Yen. The sprawling project is set to feature a 5-star hotel, luxury villas and two golf courses designed by two-time U.S. Open champion Bryson DeChambeau on nearly 2,500 acres of land.
The groundbreaking ceremony, set in a white tent with rows of tables and plastic chairs in a field 37 miles south of the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, was much less glamorous than the sleek Middle Eastern offices Eric had visited to cut a similar deal in Qatar just three weeks earlier. But to this Southeast Asian country and Dang Thanh Tam, the Vietnamese entrepreneur behind this deal, it is a huge win. Sandwiched between Eric and Vietnam’s prime minister Pham Minh Chinh, Dang, 61, beamed for the cameras as golden confetti rained onto the stage.
“This project is more than a development,” said Eric at the event. “It’s a commitment to excellence, a celebration of culture and a lasting investment in Vietnam’s future.” Dang joined in: “We are extremely excited to bring this vision to life.”
The deal was signed last September in New York—two months before Trump won the U.S. presidential election. It’s already been valuable for Trump, with Dang’s firm paying the Trump Organization $5 million in licensing fees for the project, according to Trump’s latest financial disclosure filed in June.
Still, the money train moves both ways: Dang has Trump to thank, not just for this deal but, in part, for his current fortune. Businesswise, Dang is much like Trump: A wheeling-and-dealing property developer who built a real estate empire atop a mountain of debt. Also, like Trump, he over-leveraged himself nearly to the point of collapse, before being rescued by larger geopolitical forces himself.
Dang is now among Vietnam’s richest people with an estimated $400 million fortune, thanks to his 34% stake in industrial park developer Kinh Bac City and his 29% stake in publicly traded telecoms infrastructure outfit Saigontel.
Dang founded Kinh Bac in 2002 and started building industrial parks just as Vietnam opened up to global markets. That brought major manufacturers like Apple supplier Foxconn to his properties. Then he took the firm public in 2007 and borrowed heavily to expand his fortune by investing in banks and mining—before almost losing it all when interest rates surged in 2011. He spent much of the following years in retreat, paying back and restructuring his firm’s debt, which had peaked at $360 million in 2013.
Then Trump took office in 2017, unleashing a trade war against China that launched a wave of relocations to Vietnam as manufacturers sought to avoid American tariffs on Beijing. Dang profited handsomely from that shift, and Kinh Bac recovered from its doldrums. In the five years between the start of Trump’s term in 2017 and the end of 2021, Vietnamese exports to the U.S. jumped by 119%—and Kinh Bac reaped the rewards, boosting its revenues and net income by 161% and 54%, respectively.
Kinh Bac currently owns nearly 20,000 acres of industrial and residential land across Vietnam with blue-chip tenants like Canon, LG and Foxconn. The $1.3 billion (market cap) company is hugely dependent on trade with America: As of last year, more than 90% of its customers were companies from China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, most of which then export their products from Vietnam to the U.S.
“The U.S. is Vietnam’s largest export market, accounting for nearly 30% of its total export turnover,” says Tieu Phan Thanh Quang, an analyst at Hanoi-based investment bank Thien Viet Securities. “The vast majority of high-tech electronics and consumer goods assembled in [Kinh Bac’s parks] have the U.S. as their final export destination.”
When Trump returned to office in January, it seemed that his second term wouldn’t be as kind to Dang as his first. Dang was already suffering from slower deliveries of industrial land to tenants in 2024, when Kinh Bac recorded a $17 million net profit on $110 million in revenues, down 81% and 46% from the previous year, respectively. Then, as part of his “Liberation Day” tariffs, Trump announced a 46% duty on Vietnamese imports in April. Kinh Bac shares slumped 27% over the following week.
Against that backdrop, the Trump International Hanoi groundbreaking in May couldn’t have come at a better time for Dang, providing a visual demonstration of his close ties to the 47th president’s family. It also marked the culmination of a relationship he’d been developing since early last year.
“We first engaged with Eric Trump through our international network. The Trump Organization conducted strict background checks on me to ensure I was clean—no laundering, no blacklists. That diligence impressed me,” Dang told Forbes via email. “We considered other partners, but Trump’s global brand, luxury expertise, and belief in Vietnam’s long-term potential aligned best with our aspirations.”
Eric Trump speaking at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Trump International resort and golf course project in Hung Yen province on May 21, 2025.
AFP via Getty Images
By June, Kinh Bac’s stock had recovered and the firm posted a $47 million net profit on $140 million in revenues in the first six months of 2025, powered by approvals for new industrial parks. And in July, Trump announced a new trade deal with Vietnam which reduced the tariff to 20%.
The deal will tax goods “transshipped,” or routed through Vietnam from other countries, at 40%. That includes goods from China, but it’s still unclear how the Trump administration will determine what counts as a transshipped product or not. Regardless, Dang is now primed to keep profiting from the trade wars and he remains bullish on his company’s prospects.
“The tariffs introduced under the Trump administration created short-term uncertainty but also accelerated global supply chain shifts. For Vietnam, this was a structural opportunity,” Dang says. Pointing to some of Trump’s main priorities, he added: “Semiconductors and advanced manufacturing are moving here. Vietnam has two key advantages: a young, trainable workforce and some of the world’s largest reserves of rare earths. [Kinh Bac] is positioning itself as the ecosystem builder for this next chapter.”
B
orn in 1964 in Haiphong, then part of North Vietnam, Dang grew up amid the Vietnam War. The conflict defined the geography of his childhood. Dang’s mother hailed from the north, his father from the south and the family moved to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in 1976, when Dang was 12, one year after the end of the war. At age 18, he moved back north for college, studying marine engineering in his hometown and later law and business in Hanoi.
Then he decided to leave the country, studying business in the U.K. and law in Australia, before returning home in 1988 to a job at Saigon Shipping Company as a marine officer. That took him to China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand. “Those years gave me a global perspective and convinced me Vietnam needed private entrepreneurs who could compete internationally,” he says.
In 1996, he left the shipping business to team up with his older sister, Dang Thi Hoang Yen, now age 66, to set up a 450-acre industrial park outside Ho Chi Minh City. As was common in the communist country, the siblings set up a joint venture called Tan Tao with a state-owned firm and a large Vietnamese bank, putting in $1 million in equity and using bank loans backed by receivables to finance the rest of the $20 million project.
Dang worked alongside his sister until 2002 when he struck out on his own with Kinh Bac City. “One of our first major wins was persuading Canon to invest in Bac Ninh,” he recalls, referring to the Vietnamese province east of Hanoi where his company built its first industrial park in 2003. “I offered highly competitive land rates and secured provincial government support to build critical road infrastructure.”
His next big break came in 2006, when he met Terry Gou—the billionaire founder (net worth: $13.2 billion) of Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, famous for making most of the world’s iPhones—on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Hanoi. That meeting led to landing Foxconn as a tenant in one of Kinh Bac’s parks in 2007, and the company remains a key customer today. “[Gou] once asked me to promise that I would always be in Vietnam to greet him, and I kept that promise,” says Dang.
That same year, Dang took Kinh Bac public on the Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange at a $1 billion valuation, which propelled him to a nearly $400 million fortune, making him the richest person in Vietnam at the time. He plowed that wealth into three banks and a titanium mining outfit, the cornerstones of what grew into a sprawling empire with five publicly traded firms by 2010. In 2011 he joined Vietnam’s national assembly, the regime’s rubber-stamp parliament, as a representative.
Then he almost lost everything. Dang had borrowed heavily to build his empire—he told Forbes Vietnam in 2021 that his strategy was “I have 1, borrow 3, and do 4”—but rising interest rates in 2011 dealt a heavy blow. By 2013, he’d sold his entire stake in two publicly traded banks and Kinh Bac City was struggling, as its debt ballooned to 188% of its equity.
“After setbacks in banking, I made the decision to divest from non-core areas and focus on industrial real estate,” he says now.
Dang Thanh Tam at his Hanoi office in 2010, when he was one of Vietnam’s richest people and was expanding his business empire.
Jeff Holt/Bloomberg
Dang got his debt under control and roared back in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Now Vietnam—and Kinh Bac—are at the core of the so-called “China plus one” strategy that manufacturers are taking to diversify and avoid being solely reliant on Beijing.
“The initial driver was the U.S-China trade war, which exposed the risk of concentrating global supply chains in a single country,” says Tieu of Thien Viet Securities. “This trend was massively accelerated by the severe operational disruptions from China’s Covid lockdowns. For critical assemblers like Foxconn and Samsung, creating a robust manufacturing alternative outside China became a strategic necessity to ensure stable access to the U.S market.”
Kinh Bac’s concentration of industrial land in the north—close to southern China’s manufacturing heartland—means it’s especially well-placed to benefit. “This proximity is a key advantage, as it allows companies to move final assembly to Vietnam while still sourcing components efficiently from long-term suppliers across the border,” says Tieu. Pointing to a northern province where Kinh Bac operates a 1,275-acre industrial park, he adds: “Foxconn has invested billions to expand its footprint in Bac Giang, specifically to produce iPads and MacBooks—products historically made only in China.”
Vietnam already makes a majority of Apple’s Macbooks, iPads and watches sold in the U.S., Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed in an earnings call on July 31. That’s not all. Besides Foxconn, Kinh Bac counts Goertek and Luxshare—Chinese companies that make components for AirPods and other Apple products—among its top customers. Both firms have also reportedly been tapped to make parts for OpenAI’s upcoming new device dreamed up by Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer.
As for Dang’s new hospitality business, the outlook is more mixed. He already runs a few hotels through a joint venture, but financing the $1.5 billion Trump-branded golf resort will be a much bigger lift. “Its success will heavily depend on how Kinh Bac structures the project financing, likely through partnerships and non-recourse debt,” adds Tieu.
Dang isn’t concerned. To him, the Trump Organization’s “global brand” will help his firm establish itself as a luxury developer. His budding friendship with the Trumps—much like his yearslong relationships with leaders at major foreign clients like Foxconn—are a competitive advantage his rivals lack.
And as the president’s firm keeps announcing foreign deals, Dang doesn’t rule out pursuing more Trump-branded projects in the future. “Trump International, Hung Yen is just the beginning,” he says, adding: “We intend to develop more luxury projects—and we remain open to partnering with Trump.”
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