Nguyen Huu Le

Founder of TMA Solutions

"I want to become a bridge that connects human resources in Vietnam with tech companies in Australia. That’s what I’m most proud of."

Dr Nguyen Huu Le’s life is linked with his two homelands - Vietnam and Australia - where he went to study when he was 18 years old.

Dr Le was born in 1949 in My Tho (Phu My District, Binh Dinh Province). Awarded a Colombo Plan scholarship, he went to Australia to study abroad in 1967, then worked in telecommunications, became an Australian citizen and spent several years working in Canada, the UK and Japan before returning to Vietnam to establish the software company TMA. In 1992, he volunteered to become the marketing director for a Canadian corporation looking to penetrate the Vietnamese market. It was this decision that fulfilled his long-standing aspiration: come back to Vietnam and leverage the existing intellectual resources in the country.

It was not by chance that many newspapers in Vietnam wrote about Dr Nguyen Huu Le. Le emerged as the founder of TMA and turned the company into one of the largest software development firms in Vietnam. Now as the Chairman of TMA Technology Group, he continues to make a mark by opening TMA Innovation Park in his hometown of Binh Dinh.

Dr Le considers the fact that Australia was among the first countries establishing diplomatic relations with Vietnam (in 1973) a fortunate event for an Australian-Vietnamese citizen like him, as this allowed him to effectively explore the potential of both countries to build a successful TMA as seen today.

One of the projects TMA undertook was developing software for Dairy Australia, which is now also being used in the US market. Another project involves a start-up in Melbourne that develops a product connecting people with hospitals and police for timely assistance. The startup lacked the human resources to develop the software as quickly as expected, so the project was outsourced to TMA. Dr Le cited these cases as examples to demonstrate what he sees as a distinctive feature of the Australia-Vietnam bilateral relations, which is genuine synergy based on mutual benefits.

After 26 years of building TMA, Nguyen Huu Le has gradually stepped down from his direct management role to spend more time defining the future development strategy of the company. “As humans, if one can do something useful then it is already a triumph for oneself, so when one can still do useful things, it is a joy,” he said.

Commenting on the 50th anniversary of Vietnam-Australia diplomatic relations, he said: “These 50 years mark a milestone for both nations that I call my home countries. I hope that in the next 25-50 years, their bilateral relations will grow even stronger!”