- OpenAI’s financials have leaked. We have the details.
- In Smalltown USA, new AI data centers pit neighbor against neighbor.
- The new Fortune Southeast Asia 500 is here.
- Markets: Global rally.
- U.S.-Iran peace deal may include $300 billion for Tehran.
- The jet fuel crisis never existed, sources say.
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]]>JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty ImagesOpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
- U.S.-Iran interim deal and the Gulf’s road to recovery
- U.S. Private Credit firms flock to the Gulf
- SpaceX’s meteoric IPO: Gulf states reap windfalls
- Paramount-Warner Bros. merger gets green light
- Plus: The 3 things we enjoyed reading this week
The Gulf Cooperation Council will have breathed a collective sigh of relief when the U.S. and Iran agreed an interim deal to end more than 100 days of war.
Announced on Sunday evening, the memorandum of understanding, which provides a 60-day ceasefire extension and free passage of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, is due to be formally signed in Geneva on Friday.
The Gulf states, often to their surprise, have been on the front line of the conflict, facing missile and drone attacks.
Is it too soon for them to start talking about a bounce back?
Historically, the Gulf has shown an ability to recover quickly after major shocks. After the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, oil production and core economic activity rebounded more quickly than many observers had anticipated, supported by oil revenues, substantial overseas assets, and government-led reconstruction. Studies of Kuwait’s recovery highlight the importance of sovereign wealth funds and strong state finances.
More recently, the recovery of Dubai’s tourism sector in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic was unusually fast by global standards. By the end of 2022, Dubai received 14.36 million international visitors, reaching 86% of pre-COVID tourism levels and outperforming the 63% global tourism recovery rate.
Admittedly, this rapid resurgence was in part driven by a combination of mega-events such as Expo 2020 and the Qatar World Cup, but Dubai also wasted no time in leveraging its position as a global aviation hub and luring tourists and residents alike through a host of tax-free incentives, visa, and citizenship reforms.
Clearly, a direct analogy cannot be drawn between a global pandemic and war—missiles striking buildings has not only shaken residents’ nerves but also investor confidence. And that will take time to return.
No doubt GCC states will need to redouble efforts to attract inward investment as businesses sit on the sidelines to see if peace lasts, but in aggregate, their economic fundamentals remain sound.
At the end of May, Fitch maintained the credit ratings and stable outlooks on five GCC states—excluding Oman—largely due to their substantial fiscal buffers that have acted as a cushion against economic shocks.
While Saudi has seen some notable downsizing of its gigaprojects, the Gulf’s healthy coffers will help ensure they remain broadly committed to pursuing their respective economic diversification strategies. The UAE’s exit from OPEC, meanwhile, brings it more immediate liquidity and fiscal flexibility.
Wood Mackenzie estimates that the fields affected by the Strait’s closure could return to 70% of pre-conflict production within three months and 90% within six months, assuming operators choose a measured and controlled ramp-up. Safely transiting the oil through the Straits of Hormuz will arguably present the bigger challenge.
The Iran war has redrawn the economic and geopolitical landscape of the Gulf but the conflict has also deepened its conviction to accelerate reforms and plans for recovery are already being hammered out.
As we have seen during the course of this war, a lot can happen in a day, let alone 60 days. Successful negotiations on the most contentious issues and the emergence of a permanent deal that could reset the Gulf’s fortunes hang in the balance.
Melissa Hancock
melissa.hancock@fortune.com
Get in touch: Reply to this email with feedback or contact me directly at the address above.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
]]>SOPA Images / ContributorA teacher from the Gurukul School of Art paints a poster featuring U.S. President Donald Trump and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, welcoming the peace agreement between the U.S. and Iran.
“It was a very painful process,” she remembers. “People who had close ties to the village suddenly have to uproot their entire existence into these hamlets. It was very heartbreaking.” When the conflict grew more intense in 1968, she joined the Communist forces as a medic at the age of 16, “concocting basic medication, saline solutions.”
That experience is a far cry from her current position, as chair of REE Corp., one of Vietnam’s leading developers of renewable energy projects, particularly in wind, hydropower, and solar. She spoke with Fortune in her Ho Chi Minh City office, answering questions in a mix of English and Vietnamese, with her Western-educated daughter translating.
Nguyen joined REE in 1982, when it was still a rusty state-owned enterprise with just one factory. Three years later, she became its director—and led the company through its privatization, its IPO, its pivot to renewable energy, and its backing by one of the world’s largest conglomerates.
Nguyen’s long career parallels the story of Vietnam as a whole: managing the consequences of a lengthy war; riding out a rapid reopening that forced the country’s companies to improve quickly; and now aligning to the most important global growth trends of the decade, like the energy transition and supply chain resilience.
Now, she is handing over REE to the next generation, stepping down from the chair role on July 10; she plans to hand over key roles to her children. But Nguyen sees plenty of opportunities in Vietnam for a renewable energy company like hers. Electricity is in increasingly high demand in Vietnam, through new goods like electric vehicles. “If dirty electricity is going into an EV, then it’s not really a green car,” she says. More important, “a lot of nascent industries here, like semiconductors and AI, all need electricity,” she notes. “We’re not self-harming in the name of development and growth. For every dollar of growth, a part of that has to go to protecting the environment.”
After the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 ended U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Nguyen returned to her education, walking for three whole months to reach Hanoi, with plans to stay in medicine. The government, however, had other plans. “The government wanted to send those with high scores to study abroad, so I was sent to East Germany—not to study medicine, but to study refrigeration.”
When she returned to Vietnam in 1982, Nguyen took a job at the Refrigeration Electrical Engineering Corp., then a sleepy state-owned enterprise with just one factory that—contrary to its name—mostly made cans for food. She had to rely on secondhand machines, like old Frick compressors, and Russian pipes; in those early days, Vietnam was still closed off from the outside world.
That changed in 1986, when Vietnam launched its Doi Moi reform program, a series of measures to open up space for the private sector and start trading with the outside world, similar to what Deng Xiaoping had launched in China almost a decade earlier. “The fundamental problem was simple: Goods were scarce while money kept being printed,” she says. “Doi Moi was like a fresh wind blowing into the Vietnamese economy.”
But new foreign competition brought its own problems, particularly for an SOE bound up in Communist-era rules. “Foreign companies could make their own decisions on who to hire, what to pay them, and investment decisions, with no one holding them back,” she says. “Vietnamese SOEs felt suffocated by comparison.”
In 1985, shortly before those reforms kicked in, the head of REE asked Nguyen to take over. “I had one condition: ‘You let me choose my own people,’ ” she says. “Many people quit.”
Now in control, Nguyen got to work revamping the company. “There was no money and no goods. I had to do it myself,” she says. Nguyen quickly realized that Vietnam, in those early days, wasn’t ready for some of her ambitions. She briefly explored manufacturing goods for Carrier and Hitachi in Vietnam, but realized that she’d need to import all the components owing to the country’s lack of basic industry. “If we’re importing everything,” she recalls thinking, “we’re not adding value.”
Since then, Nguyen has been at the forefront of Vietnam’s rapid reforms. In 1993, REE Corp. became the country’s first SOE to privatize. Then, in 2000, REE became the first company to list on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange.
REE Corp. pivoted to energy in 2010, with investments in hydro-power, solar, and wind power generation. Energy now contributes almost half of its revenue, which was 10 trillion Vietnamese dong ($380 million) in 2025. It’s also a leading mechanical and electrical contractor, and has smaller businesses in real estate and environmental services. REE now targets revenue of $489 million for 2026, an increase of 22% over 2025, and net income of $112 million. It’s also planning a $1 billion push to expand its offshore wind capability.
One of REE’s major backers is Jardine Cycle & Carriage, a Singapore-listed subsidiary of the Hong Kong–based Global 500 conglomerate, Jardine Matheson. Cycle & Carriage owns just over 40% of REE’s shares.
On May 16, after Fortune’s interview, Nguyen announced that she will step down as REE’s chair in July, handing the role to Lee Liang Whye, Cycle & Carriage’s CEO. Her son, Nguyen Ngoc Thai Binh, will take over as CEO; he currently serves as deputy CEO and has spent 18 years at the company.
Vietnam is now pushing an aggressive economic campaign to lift GDP growth to 10% by the end of the decade, and become a high-income country by 2045, backed by an aggressive infrastructure investment program.
All that economic activity will need electricity. By 2030, Vietnam hopes to generate 150 gigawatts of power, with one-third of that coming from renewable energy. By 2050, Vietnam wants to be net zero, with as much as 70% coming from green energy. The country also hopes to impose a cap on coal power generation, and in March 2026 it announced a deal with Russian firm Rosatom to build two nuclear reactors at a plant in Ninh Thuan province in southern Vietnam.
The war in Iran has only heightened Vietnam’s need to change its energy mix. Vietnam imported 14.1 million tonnes of crude oil and 3.63 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas last year; while Vietnam has a large domestic refining industry, it still sources about a third of its refined fuel products from overseas.
“We’re not self-harming in the name of development. For every dollar of growth, a part of that has to go to protecting the environment.”
Nguyen Thi Mai Thanh, on the role of green energy.
Vietnam draws most of its imported oil from the Middle East, yet this trade has been blocked by Iran’s decision to close the Strait of Hormuz. China’s decision to halt exports of refined fuel products has also led to shortages. Vietnam has managed to avoid some of the energy conservation measures imposed by its neighbors, like Thailand’s order for government workers to take the stairs instead of the elevator. Yet consumer prices rose by 5.5% in April, and Vietnam posted a rare trade deficit as increased oil prices inflated its import numbers.
Nguyen thinks one thing Vietnam can change in response to the Iran shock is expanding offshore wind, though she warns that it could take as long as six years to get a project up and running.
Hanoi’s energy push is part of a broader investment scheme across the country. Hanoi is spending billions of dollars on new transport infrastructure, including new expressways, railways, ports, and airports.
But all that investment is costly—and the money needs to come from somewhere.
“The country is expected to double its energy generation, but it requires a lot of capital to develop these power generation assets,” Nguyen says. Beyond energy, “the government has estimated a total investment cost of $1.5 trillion for development as a whole. It can bear about 20% of this cost, meaning the remaining 80% has to come from other parts of the economy.”
Nguyen is still as blunt as she was four decades ago, when she took over REE. “My concern on the financing side is that Vietnamese banks do not have the ability to fund these projects on their own.”
She’s also concerned that Vietnam’s much-touted export boom is shallower than it appears. The Southeast Asian country has attracted manufacturing in sectors like apparel and electronics, as companies look to avoid China’s higher labor costs and build some supply-chain resilience.
In an echo of her observations about Vietnam’s lack of basic industry back in her early days running REE, Nguyen still feels like Vietnamese manufacturing isn’t as deep as it needs to be. “Let’s take Samsung, for example. They have large manufacturing facilities here. But what exactly are we contributing to the supply chain?” she asks. (Samsung is Vietnam’s largest foreign investor, committing more than $20 billion in direct investment, and accounts for as much as 16% of the country’s total exports.) “The cleaning, the assembly, the packaging, it’s less than 10% of the value. There’s no technology transfer.”
That’s why she thinks Vietnam’s future lies elsewhere, in agriculture and fisheries. “We should be investing in technology to help us amplify these strengths,” she says.
And as it happens, the same natural endowments that power her renewable energy business underpin those agricultural strengths, too.
“We’re blessed with sun, wind, water, and land,” she says.
Additional reporting by Nam Nguyen.
This article appears in the June/July 2026: Asia issue of Fortune with the headline “Four decades at the top: A career that tracks Vietnam’s rise.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
]]>Courtesy of ReeUnder Nguyen’s leadership, REE became Vietnam’s first stateowned enterprise to list on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange.
Just over 21 million people visited Vietnam in 2025, a 20% jump from the year before, according to government statistics. Last year, Vietnam surpassed Thailand as the most popular destination for Chinese tourists, drawing 5.3 million visitors, ahead of the 4.5 million headed to Thailand. The government now hopes to generate 1.1 quadrillion Vietnamese dong, or $41 billion, from tourism this year.
“Vietnam’s location puts it in a prime position for tourism development, and its potential is bolstered by its cultural heritage,” Mai Van Chinh, one of the country’s deputy prime ministers, said at a tourism forum last September, praising the country’s “diverse cuisines, beautiful landscapes, and gracious people.”
It’s not just the traditional hubs of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City that are popular. Travel to the island of Phu Quoc and the northwestern town of Sa Pa more than doubled in 2025, according to data from Klook, an Asian travel platform. “Tourists are seeking out nature-driven and culturally distinct destinations beyond the major cities,” says CS Soong, Klook’s vice president of corporate development.
The conversation over Vietnam’s economic potential focuses on its manufacturing sector, exporting electronics, apparel, and other goods to markets all over the world. Yet tourism, which contributes almost 10% of GDP, shows the country can compete on the services side, too.
“Vietnam is competing with Thailand and Malaysia to become the top destination in the region,” says Le Hong Hiep, a senior fellow at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
Though Southeast Asia is better known as a destination for backpackers seeking entertainment and lodging on the cheap, Vietnam might be ready for a different kind of traveler.
“Backpackers do not spend much,” Le says. “The government is trying to attract tourists who can spend more and stay longer in the country.”
That means business, luxury, and medical travelers. Vietnam’s health ministry expects the medical tourism industry to grow from $700 million in 2024 to nearly $4 billion by 2033. Conference travel is also expanding, with Mordor Intelligence forecasting the industry will grow from $7.8 billion today to $10.3 billion in 2031.
One reason for Vietnam’s travel boom is, quite simply, that it’s easier to get there. Last year, Vietnam allowed nationals of a dozen countries, including Belgium, Hungary, and Switzerland, to stay in the country for 45 days without a visa; now, 39 countries get some kind of visa-free access.
“If visa restrictions are lifted, that’s beneficial for any travel location,” says Alexandra Murray, vice president and regional head of Southeast Asia for Hilton, the U.S.-based hotel group. “Tourists can be more spontaneous in their travel plans.”
Vietnam’s airlines are also making an aggressive play for international expansion. Vietjet, the country’s leading private airline, is launching new flights from China, Japan, and Singapore, and is considering new routes from Europe. Vietnam’s traveler pool is expanding beyond traditional sources like Singapore and South Korea; Klook data suggests that now Filipino and Indian travelers are driving regional demand, while long-haul tourism from the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand is also accelerating. Still, China and South Korea remain the two biggest sources of tourists to Vietnam by a large margin, with Russia a distant third.
“It’s like nothing I’ve seen in any other country, not even in the Middle East.”
Alexandra Murray, VP, Hilton
Hanoi is channeling money toward expanding infrastructure in tourist hotspots. For example, the government has invested over $830 million for a new airport in Phu Quoc, helmed by Sun Group, a local conglomerate, and the Changi Airport Group, the firm behind Singapore’s world-leading aviation hub. This, and other investments, are being made ahead of the 2027 APEC Summit, taking place on the island.
Foreign companies aren’t getting left out. Vingroup recently signed an agreement with U.K. hospitality company IHG Hotels & Resorts to bring four brands to Can Gio, a coastal district in Ho Chi Minh City. Sun Group also deepened its partnership with Hilton last year, with plans to develop five hotels encompassing over 2,000 rooms across Phu Quoc, Da Nang, and Quang Ninh.
“Lots of great construction contracts have been awarded,” Murray says. “It’s like nothing I’ve seen in any other country, not even in the Middle East. It’s strategic too, so Vietnam can cement its place in Southeast Asia as an up-and-coming place to invest in.”
“Local companies are building more hotels in major cities, but they need to partner with foreign operators so they can market themselves as international hotels to attract foreign tourists,” says Le of the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute.
But while aggressive growth is important in the short run, it’s crucial for Vietnam’s tourism industry to pursue sustainable, long-term gains. “It’s not just about growing tourism across Vietnam, but how to do so sustainably,” Le explains. “We want repeat tourism arrivals, so the focus is on how to improve the quality of services so that travelers will stay longer, spend more, and come back.”
Thailand’s struggles with tourism are indicative of how the industry can go wrong. The COVID pandemic torpedoed the country’s tourism industry, and political instability and fears about crime have kept some tourists, particularly from China, away. Thailand is also scaling back its visa-free program, with visitors now getting to stay for only 30 days, down from 60, to better attract “quality tourists” instead of those trying to take advantage of a lengthy Thai sojourn.
“Vietnam observed how places like Bali and Thailand suffer from over-development and overtourism,” says Vu Minh Khuong, a practice professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. “We’re also learning by doing, and care a lot about international best practices,” Vu adds.
It’s possible the surge of tourists eventually peters out. That will leave the country with a lot of underused hotels and airports. “At some point in the future, Vietnam may face the same problem as Thailand—where tourism infrastructure is abundant, but there’s a struggle to fill rooms,” Le says.
This article appears in the June/July 2026: Asia issue of Fortunewith the headline “Asia’s new tourist hotspot.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
]]>Ummu Nisan Kandilcioglu—Anadolu/Getty ImagesAt Ha Long (“Descending Dragon”) Bay, a Unesco World Heritage site, last July.
To explore whether Americans and Gen Zers in particular have truly fallen out of love with fast casual, SmartSense by Digi surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults about their dining preferences, concerns and behaviors, as well as the roles the economy and food safety play in dining out decisions, especially within the fast casual space.
The findings were clear: Gen Z still loves fast casual. The “slop bowl” meme, it turns out, is more term of endearment than indictment. At the same time, Gen Z consumers hold fast casual brands to high standards, particularly around food safety, value and consistency during a difficult economic climate.
Fast Casual Proves Resilient in a Tough Economy
SmartSense found that 66% of American adults say their dining-out budgets have tightened over the past year. Counterintuitively, Gen Z adults (ages 18–29) are slightly less likely than average to say this (63%), even though they’re more likely than any other generation to report that their financial situation has worsened compared to a year ago (67% versus 59% of U.S. adults overall).
The apparent contradiction resolves quickly on closer inspection. Despite widespread economic pressure, fast casual remains more resilient than traditional sit-down dining thanks to Gen Z diners. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of Americans say they are more likely to choose fast casual over sit-down restaurants when money is tight, a trend reinforced by strong earnings from Cava and Chipotle. Nearly half of Gen Z respondents (49%) go even further to say they would increase spending overall at fast casual restaurants when money is tight, the highest of any generation and far above the national average of 31%.
Though the most practical assumption might be that young consumers would cut restaurants out altogether, what’s actually happening is that they’re becoming more strategic about where they spend. Part of this behavior is lifestyle-driven. While most Gen Zers are adults, fewer are married, as the median age at first marriage nears 30 (roughly five years older than it was when many of their parents married in the early 1990s). As a result, many young Americans are cooking and dining for one, and stretching a fast casual bowl across two or three meals is far more frugal and convenient than buying groceries to prepare a single homemade meal, especially as grocery prices continue to rise.
Mixed Bowls Stir Up Mixed Feelings
Despite growing online jokes about “slop bowls” and exaggerated headlines, outright disillusionment with these customizable meals remains relatively limited. Just 15% of Gen Z cite low variety or poor quality as a source of fatigue, suggesting the “slop” label simply does not resonate with most young consumers. Additionally, Gen Z stands out for how frequently they visit fast casual restaurants and how much they spend on dining overall. They are more likely than any other generation to eat fast casual three times a week or more (25%) and to spend between $300 and $500+ per month on dining and takeout for their household (34%).
It’s clear Gen Zers are fast casual’s biggest fans. But they’re also the sector’s biggest critics. Their skepticism centers on concerns that many fast casual restaurants are not run efficiently and do not prioritize food safety as much as they should.
Gen Z Emerges as Food Safety’s Strongest Advocate
More than two-thirds of Gen Z respondents (68%) believe fast casual restaurants are more likely to cut corners on food safety than full-service restaurants, tied with Millennials for the highest of any generation and well above the 60% national average. Gen Z is more likely than any other generation to see fast-casual restaurants as especially susceptible to food recalls, with 61% expressing that concern, compared with 37% of Boomers.
How well a restaurant operates also matters deeply to Gen Z. They are the most likely generation to associate visible staffing shortages with poor management (61%) and to report a recent dining experience disrupted due to staffing shortages (55%). Similarly, 89% of Gen Z say the restaurant’s cleanliness, and 75% say the restroom’s cleanliness, influences their perception of restaurant food safety. Their perspective may sound critical, but as the generation that grew up with access to social media and delivery apps, they’re likely to be privy to food recalls as soon as the news hits and conditioned to expect speed and convenience as baseline requirements.
Gen Z’s critical approach hurts restaurant brand loyalty and revenue. Sixty-six percent (66%) of Gen Zers say they’ll avoid a restaurant forever after learning about a food safety violation, and nearly half (47%) say a dramatically inconsistent experience across restaurant locations would also prompt them to never return.
A Call to Action Before LA28
There’s a looming deadline for restaurant operators, and Gen Z’s criticism and actionable input may just help them meet it. The U.S. will welcome a surge of visitors from around the world for LA28 in 2028, with four million tickets already sold. With more tourism comes more business for restaurants. To handle the scale, they may need to source food from new suppliers and hire temporary staff who aren’t fully in the loop on best practices. This creates new challenges, both operationally and from a food safety perspective, and could prove to be a critical moment for the U.S. culinary scene.
Fortunately, the opportunity for brands is clear: consumers increasingly reward restaurants that visibly demonstrate food safety and operational discipline. The study finds Americans, including Gen Z, are more likely to dine at restaurants that publicize their use of technology to prioritize cleanliness and enforce food safety standards at every location through centralized oversight. There are fast casual brands out there that provide great blueprints for what this looks like in practice; other restaurant operators just need to take notes to overcome the slop reputation for good.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
]]>Getty ImagesGen Z calls it slop — and loves it.
Bieber’s outfit is part of a larger story: Vietnam’s export-dependent economy is beginning to leverage intellectual property to move up the value chain.
Vietnam’s booming cultural scene is sitting between a top-down drive by the government to elevate culture to a policy priority, and a bottom-up push by a generation of young creators empowered by rising consumer spending and cheap internet access. The companies that manage this talent hope that culture, like everything else in Vietnam, can be reengineered as an export product.
Last Year’s Resolution 68 affirmed the private sector as Vietnam’s “most important driving force.” It dominates commentary about General Secretary To Lam’s reform push, dubbed Doi Moi 2.0, a reference to Vietnam’s 1980s economic transformation.
Yet Resolution 80, passed in January, could end up being just as important to the growing cultural economy. The measure established culture as an indispensable foundation of Vietnam’s sustainable development, a coequal pillar alongside the economy, society, and the environment.
“The resolution emphasizes the role of cultural industries in the economic development of the country,” says Duc Khuong Nguyen, a senior fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy and an advisor to the government. Hanoi has long used culture to encourage patriotic feelings and build some cohesion across the country’s 54 ethnic groups, but “recognizing culture as a business is quite recent,” he notes.
Vietnam’s government wants the cultural economy to grow by 10% every year, and make up 7% of GDP by 2030. In the past 12 months, To Lam’s government has announced a new public holiday to celebrate culture; its first-ever national showcase at the Venice Biennale; and the launch of Vietnam Today, an English-language state-owned broadcaster in the mold of China’s CGTN.
The government also broke ground on a number of showstopping construction projects, including a lavish new opera house in Hanoi, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, and a 135,000-seat stadium, set to be the world’s largest upon its completion in 2028.
The cultural scene is also growing from the bottom up. “Vietnam’s pop culture is leaking out through the internet rather than through state-sponsored engineering,” William Lee Adams, a Vietnamese American journalist and cultural commentator, explains. “Twenty years ago people wanted to imitate the Western world; now it’s about reflecting their own lives. The country’s young, digitally connected population has created this creative incubator.”
An additional 23.2 million people are projected to join Vietnam’s middle class by 2030, making it one of the fastest-growing globally. This rising consumer class will eventually “transition the country from ‘make in Vietnam and export to the rest of the world’ to ‘make and sell in Vietnam,’” says Luke Treloar, a partner and strategy group head at KPMG in Vietnam.
Vietnam, with a gross national income (GNI) per capita of around $4,500, is still a relatively poor country compared with Asian cultural powerhouses like South Korea, Japan, or even Thailand. But Adams thinks the country can “bypass the need for money,” thanks to digital infrastructure and a “culturally confident” youth population. “South Korea built its global pop empire after reaching high-income status, but Vietnam is proving you can start producing and exporting culture earlier in your development curve.”
A sudden rise in the popularity of homegrown pop music, or V-pop, is driving growth for pop culture players like Yeah1, DatVietVAC, and POPS. Even bigger companies are getting into the business: Vingroup, one of Vietnam’s biggest conglomerates and No. 26 on the Southeast Asia 500, added culture as a new “core pillar” of its strategy in November.
Yeah1, the country’s first listed media company, reported a 60% revenue jump in 2025, driven by products like its flagship singing-competition reality TV show, Anh Trai Vuot Ngan Chong Gai (Call Me by Fire), which draws live audiences of up to 50,000 people a night and is streamed to millions of fans worldwide. The company recorded 82 billion views across its 200 owned channels last year, according to its annual report.
“By the end of this year I will take my boy band Uprize outside of Vietnam,” Thao Le Phuong, Yeah1’s chairwoman, pledges, referring to a seven-member boy group cultivated through another reality competition show. Uprize is managed by SYE Holdings, a new joint venture between Yeah1 and Sony Music with a focus on international markets.
POPS, another growing Vietnamese music and entertainment company, is preparing to list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and planning its own international expansion. “It’s our duty to recognize the dreams of our artists,” POPS founder Esther Nguyen says.
And that dream is to break out of Vietnam and go global. “Of course our artists want to have resonance in the local market, but their ultimate goal is always: ‘How do I get outside of Vietnam? How do I make it in the U.S.?’” she says.
This article appears in the June/July 2026: Asia issue of Fortune with the headline “Vietnam’s pop culture takes the stage.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
]]>Courtesy of Yeah1The V-pop boy band, UPRIZE, is aiming for an international debut.
Good morning. The hardest decision for a CEO isn’t just knowing what to build. It’s knowing when to stop.
Not so for David Cordani, who grew Cigna from $18 billion in annual revenue to $275 billion over 17 years, in part through the 2018 Express Scripts acquisition that gave rise to the Evernorth health services business. Cordani is stepping down as CEO on July 1, becoming executive chairman. I spoke with him recently about the industry, AI, and what it actually feels like to hand over the keys.
On the his ‘leadership moment.’ When COVID-19 hit, Cordani was on the executive committee of the industry’s trade association. The question on the table: would they cover all vaccination costs? “I asserted that we need to,” he told me. Within two hours, they had an agreement and a plan worked out with HHS and the White House. Then he pushed further: would they proactively commit to covering all COVID-related services, regardless? “It was silent,” he said. “I postulated, if not, if not now, when? The board never said, ‘Let’s see the business case and the EPS impact.’ We said our mission guides this decision. To me, that is a leadership moment.” Cigna was the first major health insurer to waive patient costs for treatment.
On AI in health care. Cordani is measured about the impact AI will have. “Sometimes we overestimate the impact in the first two years and underestimate the impact over the first 10 years,” he said. He doesn’t believe AI is ready to make clinical decisions but sees real value in curating information to support them. His other concern: “It makes cyber challenges even more significant.” Worth keeping in mind as your own teams push for faster AI deployment.
On what leadership actually requires now. “Leadership today is less hierarchical, it’s less authoritative, it’s more coaching and enabling,” he said. “It has to have authenticity and vulnerability, and it has to have fluidity and dynamism in it.” His biggest regret? Not listening actively enough, early enough. “The impatience of a type A action orientation gets in the way of truly understanding.”
On letting go. “When you’re in the CEO role, you’re in the service of the company,” he said. “I challenge myself not to become too attached to the identity of CEO.” His definition of success: a transition so seamless he’s “somewhat forgotten” because successor Brian Evanko and his team will be so effective. After 25 years in leadership roles, he admits he’s going into an unknown. “I’m trying to be intellectually honest. I’m trying not to lie to myself,” he said. “I will seek to be an active part in helping the health and wellbeing systems evolve, because as a society we’re better off if people have higher levels of vitality.”
And a proven way to maintain that vitality is to continue to find a sense of purpose in what you do.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
]]>Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty ImagesDavid Cordani has served as CEO of Cigna Group for 17 years and is stepping down in July.
Governments across the GCC are implementing ambitious economic diversification strategies—including Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, UAE 2031, and the Dubai Economic Agenda (D33)—with increased privatization and supporting the expansion of local SMEs being central to much of this growth.
With GCC banks typically prioritizing lending to large corporates and government-related entities, SMEs currently account for less than 10% of total bank lending in the GCC, which has led to a substantial credit gap estimated at approximately $250 billion—a gap that global private credit is seeking to close.
Partners for Growth is a prime example. Headquartered in San Francisco, with an office in Dubai, the firm specializes in providing custom debt solutions for high-growth companies and was one of the early entrants on the scene when it provided its first funding to a Gulf entity back in 2020.
Since then, it has deployed around $450 million in commitments into the Gulf—predominantly across Saudi and the UAE—helping to scale some of the region’s most prominent technology companies, including Saudi fintech unicorn Tabby, TruKKer, Bayzat, Syarah, Huspy, and Silkhaus.
PFG provided $10 million funding to Tabby after their seed round and played a key role in its subsequent meteoric growth—it continues to be a lender to it today.
“Our focus is on lending to emerging tech and innovation companies,” Armineh Baghoomian, managing director of Partners for Growth, told Fortune.
“Many companies we lend to have been around for maybe a year or two. Most banks are still trying to get their heads around lending against very few years of financial history and little to no profitability. So that opens up a whole window of opportunity—that’s predominantly what we look at.”
The firm’s specialty is providing highly structured facilities to asset-heavy businesses, with most of the deals that PFG has worked on in the region being sharia-compliant.
“The birth to death of a transaction has been tested under Sharia-structured instruments,” said Baghoomian. “The entrepreneurs tend to like it and want them. A lot of investors request them as well.”
To date, PFG has partnered with entities such as Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), as well as Saudi Venture Capital, Sukna Capital which offers sharia-compliant financing and investment solutions to support SMEs and Jada, an investment vehicle created by Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund PIF.
“The Gulf is one of the few places where you see national agendas that are pushing economic diversification from a centralized source of revenue,” said Baghoomian.
“And so that’s really the driver of a number of very strong innovation ecosystems in each country. There’s a lot of international institutional capital that’s now come in as well because the fundamentals are sound.”
Global private credit firms enter the field
In April, PIF announced it would anchor a new private credit fund managed by King Street Capital Management, which will provide capital to corporates and conduct asset-based lending across the region.
King Street, a leading global alternative asset manager that manages $30bn in assets, has been expanding its regional presence in recent years as it seeks to capitalize on new investment opportunities.
“We believe the regional private credit market will need to grow by at least 15-30% annually over the next five years to finance economic development in Saudi Arabia and the Mena region,” said Brian Higgins, founder and managing partner of King Street, adding that it is currently in the process of opening an office in Riyadh.
Last week, Blue Owl Capital expanded its Middle East footprint with the launch of a new regional headquarters in Abu Dhabi Global Marketplace (ADGM)—the emirate’s international financial center. The firm already has an office in Dubai.
Haitham Abdulkarim, managing director of Blue Owl’s Abu Dhabi office, told Fortune: “Over the last decade, the Middle East has emerged as both a strategic global market and a sophisticated investor across asset classes, particularly alternatives.
“We continue to see strong interest in areas such as digital infrastructure, private credit, asset-backed finance, real assets, and General Partner strategic capital.”
Housing teams from the firm’s Institutional Capital and General Partner (GP) Stakes divisions, the opening marks Blue Owl’s seventh office in the EMEA region and its 23rd globally.
Blue Owl has been steadily stepping up its investment activity in the Gulf. Last September, it partnered with the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, to launch a $3-billion digital infrastructure platform designed to accelerate computational capacity for hyperscalers.
Large global asset managers that partner with sovereign funds have historically focused on raising capital regionally; while local transactions may previously have been too small for their mandate, this is now changing.
However, Baghoomian said that it is not uncommon that the sovereign will require them to redeploy into the local ecosystem. “For every dollar you raise from sovereign funds, certainly development-oriented ones, you should expect that there may be a requirement to reinvest in the local ecosystem,” she said.
Impact of the Iran war:
While the PFG initially saw a slowdown in business due to the Iran war, Baghoomian said it has since seen a pickup due to other lenders feeling the strain and has signed two new term sheets over the last few months.
“We’re still looking at deals and doing deals but a situation like this really tests the capital providers in the region,” she said.
“Some funds have paused lending while we’ve heard of others that have said they’re going to pull out.”
At approximately $5 billion, the size of the Gulf’s private credit market remains modest compared to that of the U.S., which is estimated at $1.3 to $1.6 trillion in assets under management, representing roughly three-quarters of the global market.
However, a PwC study published last year noted how the market is becoming increasingly sophisticated and is transitioning toward more specialized and targeted product offerings such as distressed debt.
“We’re seeing a lot of products being developed and launched and issued here that you would not have seen even a year ago,” said Baghoomian.
“There’s more NAV (net asset value) financing and we’re definitely seeing some distressed deals get done, as well as some General Partner financing being done. So the pace of development is picking up now and we’re seeing structures that you might see in the U.S. and Europe become available here.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
]]>ADGMADGM building on Abu Dhabi skyline.
“When the balance of your life becomes a topic, then you have a problem,” Ereño exclusively told Fortune. “You need to like your job, to not feel that your life needs to be balanced.”
Essentially, in his eyes, needing to separate work from life with a hard 5 p.m. cutoff doesn’t make sense when you genuinely love what you do. So if you’re constantly counting down the hours to the end of the day, it’s probably a sign that something fundamentally isn’t clicking.
Ereño says he loves running the £16.9-billion-a-year ($23 billion) Fortune 500 Europe company with over 100,00 employees—so much so he thinks about it even while at the gym lifting weights with his 23-year-old son. And it doesn’t stop there.
“I enjoy thinking about business things on the weekends,” the 61-year-old admitted. “I do emails, and I read my papers and all of that. Do I feel that that is a big pressure? No … I enjoy doing that. So I don’t feel I need to think about how I balance my life.”
His advice for anyone who lives for the weekend? “I think the advice here is to take some time to think about what you like doing,” he added. “Don’t do a job that you don’t like, so then you need balance.”
In other words, stop chasing work-life balance and instead start asking yourself why you’re craving it. Consider that it might be time to change not just your schedule, but your career.
The Fortune 500 Europe CEO’s strict daily routine
When Ereño is not running a multibillion-dollar health care group, he is, by his own admission, still very much in work mode. Just not in a way that feels punishing to him.
He starts most mornings around 6:30 a.m. with a black coffee and six newspapers—three in English, three in Spanish—on his iPad before jumping on the Tube (Britain’s subway) to Bupa’s London office.
By 8 a.m., the meetings begin. They are back‑to‑back until roughly 6 p.m. That’s when he takes a mental pause: “I spend some time with myself, a little bit of reflecting on the day, maybe answering a few emails.” Then he finally leaves the building—not for the sofa, but for a 50‑minute walk home that he originally introduced as a “detox” and has since turned into a nonnegotiable daily habit.
When he’s “off duty,” he hits the gym—keeping pace with his Gen Z son. “I go to the gym six times a week. I do four days of weights and two days on the treadmill,” he said, adding that he’ll often talk through work dilemmas with his son (who doubles up as his personal trainer) while working out.
And he insists that that kind of regimen is “100% totally” necessary when managing over 100,000 employees and serving the needs of over 60 million customers worldwide.
“My decisions impact many people,” Ereño added, and that “amalgamation of staying grounded, doing some exercise, and having as stable a life as possible” is the framework that keeps him sane and able to lead with clarity under pressure.
Many CEOs scoff at work-life balance
It’s a take that might ruffle feathers in a post-pandemic world that has come to treat work-life balance as a nonnegotiable. But some of the most successful people on the planet would tell you Ereño is simply stating the obvious.
Scale AI billionaire Lucy Guo, who wakes up at 5:30 a.m. and works until midnight, puts it plainly: “I would say that if you feel the need for work-life balance, maybe you’re not in the right work,” she told Fortune. The 30-year-old, who dethroned Taylor Swift as the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world, says work simply doesn’t feel like work to her: “I love doing my job.” Sound familiar?
Likewise, Grammy-winning artist turned AI entrepreneur Will.i.am echoes that when you’re building something that’s truly yours, the grind doesn’t feel like a grind. “Work-life balance means that you’re working for somebody else’s dream,” he told Fortune, adding that he hasn’t stopped working, even to celebrate his birthday, in years.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman goes further, saying that workers who chase work-life balance are “not committed to winning.” When he was running the company, staff were expected to always be on—with one exception. Dinner with family. After that? “Open up your laptop and get back in the shared work experience and keep working.”
Jensen Huang’s company, Nvidia, recently became the most valuable in the world—and he says it’s thanks to his relentless, always-on approach. “I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. I work seven days a week,” he has said. “When I’m not working, I’m thinking about working.” His justification? “If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy.”
Despite having dinner with his family every night at the White House, former President Barack Obama noted you shouldn’t expect to have work-life balance if you want a thriving career. “If you want to be excellent at anything—sports, music, business, politics—there’s going to be times of your life when you’re out of balance, where you’re just working and you’re single-minded,” he said on The Pivot Podcast, adding that when he was running for president he went a year and a half without proper weekends.
And Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose company has surged past a $350 billion market cap, has a blunt message for Gen Z specifically: “I’ve never met someone really successful who had a great social life at 20.”
His advice isn’t to give up everything, but like Ereño, to find work that makes the sacrifice feel worth it. “Most people have something they’re talented at and enjoy. Focus on that. Organize your whole life around that.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
]]>Irina R. Hipolito—Europa Press/Getty ImagesBupa’s CEO says if you’re obsessing over work-life balance, your problem isn’t the hours—it’s the job. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Barack Obama agree.
When asked by Fortune’s Term Sheet Editor Allie Garfinkle about what happens when AI goes wrong, Serhant, the founder and CEO of his namesake brokerage Serhant, remembered a time when he was selling a New York City penthouse.
It was the kind of trophy asset that’s infamously hard to price because it’s impossible to find comparisons. After what Serhant described as a “contentious” back-and-forth—he likened it to dueling “kings of the world,” with the buyer and the seller each wanting to win—the deal sheet went out at $50 million flat. Then, at the 11th hour, it nearly died.
That’s because the buyer, Serhant said, went to ChatGPT and typed a version of “I’m looking to buy this, is $50 million too much?” The chatbot said yes.
The buyer’s broker then called Serhant to pull out of the deal because AI said it wasn’t worth it. Unsurprisingly, Serhant’s reaction was pretty blunt, telling the broker the move was “dumb” and “stupid.”
Serhant recalled telling the buyer’s broker “your client’s incredibly smart and wealthy, isn’t he using the data? He’s like, ‘I don’t know what to tell you, man. Super intelligence just told him, ‘Don’t do this, it’s not worth it.’”
So then Serhant had to relay the bad news to his client, who did what “anyone would do in that situation,” and turned to ChatGPT too.
The client asked ChatGPT the inverse question: “I have a buyer that no longer wants to spend [$50 million] because you told him not to. Is $50 million too little? And ChatGPT said, ‘You know what, you’re right, it is.’”
To salvage the deal, the fix wasn’t using more AI. It was using old-fashioned research like “off-market context and data that LLMs can’t scrape,” Serhant said.
He also went on to post a video about the debacle on social media, which he said racked up 3 million views in about three hours. Both clients saw it, both came back to the table, and the deal got done.
AI models “know the history of the internet, they don’t know the path forward, and they don’t know what the internet, and Reddit, and Zillow and Realtor.com does not know,” Serhant said. “And we got the deal done, and now I can tell that story as a win and not as a fail.”
This story is part of a larger debate he has been having publicly for a while about whether AI amplifies real estate agents or replaces them. It’s a controversy that’s been simmering for a couple of years now, with one award-winning professor telling Fortune in March 2024 that real estate agents are becoming more like travel agents.
“If you think about what an agent does for you, I think it’s very different than what they used to do for you because so much more information is available on the internet,” Andrew C. Spieler, a distinguished professor in business and finance at Hofstra University, told Fortune.
Like travel agents, realtors were once the “gatekeepers” of information. They had access to MLS listings that consumers couldn’t find on their own, so buyers had to be much more “dependent” on their agents to even start house hunting. But now, he argued, that information is more readily available.
Unsurprisingly, real estate agents beg to differ. Serhant, for example, said real estate agents are even more important to wealthier clients because they want to be told what to do, have someone to defer to, and if something goes wrong, someone to blame. AI can’t absorb that, he said.
“People hate being sold,” Serhant said. “But they love shopping with friends.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
]]>Stuart Isett/FortuneRyan Serhant at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: fortune.com
