Phu My Hung

Privately held city development promoters decide whether to partner on next phase or go it alone in a 20-year, 4000-acre project. Set outside of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, this decades-long project led by two Taiwanese families reshaped and built the economic environment of Vietnam's financial capital. The promoters had a long-term vision and left very substantial capital invested for a very long time. This allowed them to follow a master plan that was resource efficient, economically attractive, and environmentally friendly (largely due to major up-front investments in power and water infrastructure). This project was promoted by industrialists with a system view and patient capital, as compared to governments with limited execution capability or real estate investors with limited capital and a shorter time horizon. The dilemma in the case is about whether or not to partner with an outside retail real estate firm in order to reduce execution and lease-up risk in a proposed new shopping mall; or whether to go it alone with the promoters's own capital doing it the promoter's own way. This expands into a discussion of the same historic choices in the project, and whether the promoters realized a below market return for their methodology. The project is quite successful and transformational today, so the opposite question can also be drawn out: is this the preferred means for promoting multiple new sustainable and competitive cities around the world, with long-view private promoters in lieu of government alone and in lieu of real estate developers alone?