For our monthly business talk we had the pleasure to talk with a Vietnamese entrepreneur who has her roots in the Vietnamese country side and an international vision for her incredible product.
HAT STONE´s history began in 1992 in Nghe An, a small mountain village, unknown at the time, nowadays well known for its marble.
Thu Ha’s mother was the owner of a little café, where her 5 daughters were working helping her with the daily tasks.
One day, a group of business men from Hanoi visited the village because they were interested in the marble, and they were looking for some local contacts in order to open a business channel, and to find help to obtain documents and permissions..
Thu Ha’s mother tried to connect people in the village but the project never started. Five years later, when she was on her forties, she decided to begin an independent project regarding the marble possible extraction, and connecting with other local farmers they decided to start. They didn’t have knowledge and machinery, all was made by hands and sweat, little step after step.
In 2007 she travelled to China , when the demand for marble was high, and she started to lay the first foundations of the company they have now.
Two years later a contract was sign for exclusivity of the marble export with a Chinese company and the year after, with the help of her daughters, she decided to upgrade the company production. From 100 cubic meters extracted daily to 500, and that was the beginning of a great story.
In 2011, one of her daughters, Thu Ha , left Vietnam for Italy with the purpose of learning all the details about the marble business, and she imported machinery from there , in order to modernize the production in Vietnam.
She spent four years travelling the world to learn everything she could about the business and went back to Saigon on 2015.
Six years later, she is now multi millionaire and thanks to the introduction of the machinery imported to work the marble. The exclusivity contract with China ended last year and now Thu Ha aims to export and sell the marble worldwide.
Not anymore raw material in blocks but refined designer objects like tables, columns, floors, wall, and other stylish objects. In 2017 Thu Ha visited her first fair specialized in Vietnamese constructions and producers and in 2020 she proposed her product at the Saigon Vietbuild expo.
What prompted you to open your company?
In my family, they do the whole process, but not in a qualitative way.
Hence the investment in machines from Italy.
My mother is old now, we have to take over and increase the quality and quantity of production.
Thu Ha has a sixth sense for predicting the future. She has invested in real estate in Saigon. She was able to gauge the country's capacity to evolve. And she was not wrong. Today, dozens of towers are built every year, entire cities are appearing, the metro is born in 2021. We are only at the beginning.
70% of the marble in Vietnam that we see comes from abroad.
It is not being used here properly. Marble costs less than importing and the quality is approximately the same as the most famous Italian marble.
In 2021, a showroom will be opened in district 2 in Thao Dien, to exhibit the quality of the products.
2022: A new Showroom in Dien Bien Phu and the construction of a new factory with new machines.
2023: Another in Phu Quoc
“I’m very confident in the future. For the next 3 years, I will do everything I can to grow, produce quality and make Vietnamese marble one of the most beautiful and recommended in the world! ”, Thu Ha