Meeting him, one would hardly expect this 36-year-old man with closely cropped hair and a relaxed expression to own Vietnam's largest sturgeon farm chain. Entrepreneur Lê Anh Đức is also the first Vietnamese person to produce and sell caviar, one of the world's most expensive and sought-after products today.
Lê Anh Đức
Starting out as a teenage boy, Lê Anh Đức began his career business by trading jeans and goods carried from Russia to Vietnam, as most Vietnamese people abroad did at the time. Later, he shifted his trading to Poland, dealing in all kinds of goods, from clothing and underwear to electronics… Recalling those days when he was just 13, the entrepreneur born in 1978 shared that “because I was younger, I felt happier than my colleagues.”
Describing himself as “a gamer,” this entrepreneur sees business as both a passion and a game testing his mind and skills. He has worked in real estate, securities, aviation, art and sturgeon. For him, life is one great game: “If you are sufficiently clear-headed and open-minded, you will find passion and joy anytime, anywhere.”
Discussing how he came to work with caviar, Lê Anh Đức shared that his family’s time living in Russia, where he became familiar with sturgeon and its value in quality, branding, and economic terms, inspired his dream of becoming wealthy from this fish. Initially, however, the entrepreneur operated only on a trial scale, rather than farming commercially as he does today.
After the Russian Federation dissolved (in 1991), sturgeon in Russia were overexploited for export revenue without conservation or restoration plans. “This brought Russian sturgeon close to extinction and onto the Red List, pushing black caviar prices to unprecedented levels, with demand exceeding supply by more than 30 times. Those factors—the thought of developing industrial-scale sturgeon farming in Vietnam, its challenges, and the rewards of success—drove me to enter this demanding venture.”
However, bringing sturgeon to Vietnam took Lê Anh Đức considerable time. A fish native to temperate regions, sturgeon was considered difficult to raise in a hot tropical country like Vietnam. It took 4 years of searching for waters with suitable climate and environmental conditions and transferring techniques from Russia before Đức achieved his first results.
The company's sturgeon stock raised in Đa Mi Lake since 2008 yielded results: 3 tons of roe and hundreds of tons of fish meat in 2013. At the Vietnamese sturgeon price of about VND 25 million/kg, it is hard to calculate the full value of Lê Anh Đức's assets when harvests over the next 2 years could reach 30 tons. That does not even account for his position on the world's “thousand-dollar caviar map,” given that global sturgeon roe production has been only 70 tons in recent years.
Many foreign groups have offered to buy all of Đức’s sturgeon roe in bulk as a raw product and repackage it under their own brands. Such proposals are common worldwide, as up to 90% of black caviar on the market carries traders’ brands rather than producers’ brands. Lê Anh Đức refused, however, because he ‘wants his products to reach the world under a Vietnamese brand.’
Describing himself as a man of many passions, Lê Đức Anh loves sports cars and high-end audio, once won Age of Empires at the Microsoft World Championship, earned first and second prizes three times in mathematics and physics Olympiads in Russia, and is now Vietnam’s first caviar magnate. Even Đức does not know how many passions he has, but he affirms: ‘My greatest passion is certainly playing the big game—life—with the people I love. I always aim to become a billionaire in experiences, passions, and affection, not money.’
A ‘horse always eager to conquer difficult and challenging tasks,’ he sees turning Vietnam, known as a poor, developing country, into ‘the world's new sturgeon destination’ as a way to demonstrate that the world is changing. He wants ‘foreign visitors to know they can bring home a bargain from Vietnam: “Caviar made in Vietnam.”’
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