1. A
INFORM JANUARY 2015
Name: Philip Young
FCMA, CGMA
Organisation:
Kuwait Petroleum
International
Job: finance manager
Start date: 2013
End date: 2014
Location: Hanoi
the largest
joint venture in
Vietnam to date
I
worked
on...
THAILAND
LAOS
VIETNAM
CAMBODIA
Hanoi
Nghi Son
fter a serious accident curtailed my motocross
career at the age of 18, I enrolled at a college in the
north of England, taking qualifications with the
Association of Accounting Technicians while in my
first job at a nearby North Yorkshire co-operative, the
Brandsby Agricultural Trading Association.
After a short management accounting position at
nearby logistics firm Freightliner, I moved on to a
13-year career with Kuwait Petroleum International
(KPI). During my first post at the Leeds production
plant, I took the CIMA qualification and worked
my way up to become financial controller
of the UK lubricants manufacturing, sales and
marketing organisation.
In 2006 I was promoted to the head office in
Antwerp, Belgium, to become finance manager for
the entire lubricants group, with a turnover of
�400m. In 2010 I was offered the position of KPI
finance & IT project manager, running global SAP
projects out of the Corporate office in The Hague,
The Netherlands, and a key member in the small
but very successful Corporate M&A team.
After eight years as an ex-pat in mainland Europe,
I was then asked to play a key part in the largest
joint venture in Vietnam to date: the ongoing project
to construct the Nghi Son oil refinery. This is being
built in Thanh Hoa province, on the coast 120
miles south of Hanoi, to provide cleaner and
more reliable fuel to support Vietnam’s rapid
economic development.
The programme – which is financed by KPI,
PetroVietnam and Japanese firms Idemitsu Kosan
‘The nation has a complex and hierarchical society,
open to relatively few outsiders, so it was a privilege
to engage with Vietnamese people and their culture’
and Mitsui Chemicals – faced the initial
challenge of managing the social impact of
rehousing 2,000 people who were living in and
around the chosen location. The second big
task was to dredge a channel five miles out to
sea so that equipment and building materials
could be shipped to the site.
One of the biggest challenges for my team
was to find skilled local staff to handle the
project’s accounting requirements. We had to
resort to using Skype video calls to interview
many candidates, but we managed to build a
team of 16. I increased budget lines from eight
to 240 in order to create departmental
reporting and greater ownership, control and
transparency on a $9.2bn budget. Because
labour costs here were about 20 per cent lower
than those in western Europe, it was important
to take care when using labour efficiency costs
to justify capex for future enterprise resource
planning modules to improve efficiency and
control.
My time in Vietnam was an incredible
experience – I witnessed a seismic shift in the
country’s fortunes. Rapid industrialisation has
continued to power the economy. For example,
the Samsung factory north of Hanoi has
recruited 16,000 local workers to meet demand
for its products, while the government has
invested heavily in transport infrastructure to
serve the nation’s growing needs.
The nation has a complex and hierarchical
society, open to relatively few outsiders, so it
was also a privilege for me to engage with
Vietnamese people and their culture – playing
badminton and golf at local clubs and dining
in colleagues’ homes, for instance. It is the
kind of experience that I would recommend to
anyone. It not only helped to shape my career;
it also gave me a unique insight into a
completely different way of life – one that’s in
the process of changing forever.