Toy Maker Hoping to Top the Top
When he was a boy growing up in Hanoi during the 1950s, Ha Trong Dung’s only toys were playthings he fashioned from cigarette packs and matchboxes fished out of the garbage.
“There were no real toys for kids back then, certainly none that you could buy,” Dung said.
Forty years later, the most popular child’s toy in Vietnam is still the simple wooden top. But Dung hopes to change that. In the process, he said, he hopes to turn a tidy profit. His fledgling venture, Protec, is ready to move into new premises and rev up production in a move that might well crown Dung Vietnam’s toy king.
“We are taking it step by step, but I am sure in the end we will have a successful company,” he said.
Dung’s foray into the brave new world of business mirrors that of a number of emerging Vietnamese entrepreneurs who are suddenly finding that the right product idea, delivered at the right price, can win a slice of the newly liberalized market.
Though his toy-making operation is still in its infancy, Dung is fielding more orders than he can handle and receiving inquiries from Taiwanese toy giants which could help give him a hefty leg-up onto the world stage.
“I am optimistic,” Dung said. “I am going to establish Protec as a limited-liability company in early 1994, and then I can leave my job at the government and work on toys full time.”
At first glance, Dung would not seem cut out to be the Vietnamese version of Santa Claus. An engineer by training, he worked for years at Vietnam’s Defense Ministry, serving for a time as a reporter for the military’s science and technology magazine.
Dung sought to branch out by learning English, which he used for two years starting in 1988 while working in Iraq as a translator for Vietnamese work teams.
Dung returned from Iraq with savings of about $10,000, enough to get him going on his first love, toys.
“In Vietnam now, most kids’ toys are guns. This is not good, as it will make them violent from a young age.”
Dung’s initial drawings were of new-style toys that could be used and reused by schools short of money to buy a range of playthings--an important factor in Vietnam where the average annual income is still less than $200.
His first invention was the HD-01, which he describes as a “table car oscillation toy.” In effect, it is a child-sized table-and-chair set on wheels which can be flipped over to act as a see-saw or hung from the ceiling as a swing.
“The kids love it,” Dung said proudly, his pen sketching quickly to show the various ways the toy can be used. “I always check my inventions first with the experts.”
Dung’s research and development laboratory is his house, which he persuaded his wife to turn into an experimental kindergarten to test his 12 different types of toys.
Here, swarms of toddlers clamber over his inventions, pushing swings, swirling merry-go-rounds and racing across the floor in their chairs on wheels. Some of the sharp metal corners on the home-soldered toys might worry parents, but the children seem happy enough.
The colorful toys are also test-run in kindergartens and nursery schools around northern Vietnam. Hanoi’s Swedish-funded children’s hospital bought 40 sets to use in its rehabilitation center for disabled children.
“The games make children more active and close to each other, thus being useful for partially paralytic or mentally disabled children,” Cam Tu, the center’s director, told an official newspaper in November.
In just three years, spurred by Dung’s natural aptitude for public relations, Protec has expanded. The money involved is still negligible by Western standards, but is typical of the start-up capital Vietnam’s small family producers use to turn themselves into real companies.
Aside from his initial investment of $10,000, Dung received a loan of roughly $3,000 from Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training to tide him over a rough patch.
In November, he received another grant of $5,000 to fund a production increase as orders piled in after he sent a mass-mailing to about 500 kindergartens in Vietnam.
