5th year in a row – Mekong Capital has won an award from Private Equity International

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (04 Oct 2017) – Mekong Capital has announced that it was awarded the 2017 Private Equity International Award for Operational Excellence for a small-cap investment in Asia, based on the performance of MobileWorld.

This is the fifth year in a row of Mekong Capital winning an award by Private Equity International, after having won the Operational Improvement Firm of the year for the Asian Small Cap category in 2013 & 2015, Frontier Market Firm of the year for 2014 & 2016.

Mekong Capital is well-known for its ‘Vision Driven Investing’ formula – the secret sauce for its series of consistently successful investments. MobileWorld has applied most of the framework and is one of the best performers of Mekong Capital’s investee companies.

The ‘Vision Driven Investing’ framework seeks to align stakeholders with investee companies to achieve big breakthrough goals. Vision Driven Investing was first introduced in 2009 and includes 14 components which are the key success drivers of Mekong Capital’s ability to add value to investee companies.

Mekong Capital has supported MobileWorld to implement the framework via different initiatives from creating a vision, improving management team, building corporate culture, and involving outside experts. For example, Mekong Capital inspired MobileWorld to create and launch its first vision in 2008 and then revised visions in 2011 and 2015. With a clear vision, MobileWorld’s team aligned around common goals, and successfully achieved their shared vision.

Since 2008, Mekong Capital recruited for MobileWorld key senior managers and executives who tremendously contributed to the success of the company. Many of them are still with the company and playing critical leadership roles.

Furthermore, Mekong Capital encouraged and assisted Mobile World to build a strong corporate culture by inviting the retailer’s 35 top people to participate in a 9-month breakthrough leadership program as well as some follow-on programs.
Once the new culture took root in the top several hundred people, they cascaded it down to others in the company.

Besides, Mekong has also fostered connections between MobileWorld and sector experts and international industry leaders, transformed the company’s incentive system, and supported its management in expanding into new business areas such as consumer electronics and grocery sectors.

As a result, MobileWorld has grown into the market leader in Vietnam’s mobile device sector and consumer electronics sector while made a successful start in the grocery sector. By Sept 2017, MobileWorld operated with 1,057+ mobile phone stores across the nation, controlling more than 42% of the national market share. The company is also operating 535+ electronics stores, controlling more than 22% of the national market share, and a small format grocery chain with 190+ stores. The company also operate a leading e-commerce website called https://www.vuivui.com/

Since 2013, Mekong Capital has made 18 partial divestments of MobileWorld including the most recent one in September 2017 in which it sold shares worth more than $18 million and realized a Gross IRR of 62.6% and gross return multiple of more than 133 times on the shares sold.

The Vision Driven Investing framework has proven itself as a secret sauce of Mekong Capital’s successful investments over time after effectively adding value to other investee firms that applied the initiative.