Beyond Sugar: Can AgriS Become Vietnam’s First Data-Led Agri Powerhouse?

Photo: Dang Huynh Uc My, AgriS’ Chairlady, speaking at Vanguard Connect Forum on Scaling Beyond Borders
— August 2025, Ho Chi Minh City

Vanguard Executive Profile (feature series), November 15th, 2025
—by Vietnam Vanguard Editorial Board

From a sugarcane legacy, AgriS is pushing itself into a more complicated identity—one that blends technology, data, ESG and a more assertive regional ambition. The person shaping that shift is Đặng Huỳnh Ức My (also known as Omi Dang), newly listed in Fortune Asia’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women (MPW). As AgriS remains the revenue anchor of TTC Group and moves into products with higher margins, one question hangs over the company: where does it sit on the global agricultural evolution ladder, and which model will carry it forward?

A Signal Moment

In May 2025, TTC AgriS opened its LEED Gold–certified headquarters in Ban Co Ward, Ho Chi Minh City. On paper, it was just a new office tower. Inside the group, it was read very differently. This was the moment AgriS officially stepped out from TTC’s long shadow. For a conglomerate still strongly associated with sugarcane and traditional plantation operations, the move symbolized something more subtle—a passing of the baton from the first generation to the second, and a conscious attempt to rewrite what a Vietnamese agricultural company can become.

The story goes back far earlier than the ribbon-cutting. Thành Thành Công Group started in 1979 as a small alcohol production unit founded by Đặng Văn Thành and Huỳnh Bích Ngọc. What followed was a dizzying period of expansion, especially after the family’s involvement in Sacombank, where Mr. Thành served as chairman during the bank’s high-growth years from 1999 to 2012.

By 2013, TTC began a deep restructuring to behave more like a modern holding group—centralized governance, shared services, family control gradually giving way to a distributed leadership model. In that second generation, one name consistently surfaced as the strategist: Đặng Huỳnh Ức My (Omi), who would later become the architect behind AgriS’s shift from commodity-heavy agriculture to a more data-informed, globally aligned model.

Fortune Asia’s recognition of her in its 2025 list didn’t surprise Vietnam’s business community; if anything, it confirmed what insiders had said for years. Omi is seen as sharp, understated, and unusually effective in navigating both boardrooms and political economy. And she has become inseparable from AgriS’s transformation story.

The Revenue Engine

Financially, AgriS continues to play the locomotive role within TTC. Revenue climbed steadily from roughly USD 770 million in FY2020–2021 to a peak of USD 1.2 billion in FY2022–2023, then settled around USD 1.1 billion in the two most recent fiscal years. Profit before tax has hovered near USD 40 million for three consecutive years—noticeably more stable than classic sugar-cycle volatility.

Sugar remains its backbone. About 17,000 hectares of plantations sit in Tây Ninh, and the rest of the company’s 60,000+ hectares stretch across the Central Highlands, southern Laos, and Cambodia. With close to 50% domestic market share, AgriS supplies raw sugar to major F&B clients including Nestlé and Vinamilk.

Omi took over as chairwoman of TTC AgriS in July 2024, after five years serving as vice chair. Under her, AgriS began talking less about “agribusiness” and more about “integrating data, technology and supply-chain finance”—phrasing unusual in a sector still dominated by land, labor and weather.

‘Coconut Lady’ and the Long Game

During a recent session with Vanguard Vietnam and leadership from Washington University in St. Louis — Olin Business School, Omi joked about being nicknamed “coconut lady.” “Coconut is both hard and soft,” she said, laughing. “It has drinkable water and a shell that’s hard to crack.” The line was delivered casually, but it hinted at something deeper: she wants coconut to become AgriS’s next strategic pillar, not a side business.

This isn’t a sudden pivot. TTC entered the coconut sector in 2010 through partnerships and later M&A with Betrimex—Vietnam’s largest coconut product manufacturer with over 12,000 hectares of organic plantations. Betrimex’s Cocoxim plant began operations in 2015, and by late 2024, AgriS had raised its equity stake above 30%, effectively securing strategic control.

The logic is straightforward: coconut offers far more value-add per unit than sugar. A coconut can be transformed into more than 250 products—oils, powders, cosmetics, activated carbon, beverages—making it a dream input for global value chains increasingly shaped by organic, plant-based, low-sugar demand curves.

Betrimex today reports over USD 200 million in revenue and 15,000 hectares of organic-certified plantations. Through a partnership with Indonesia’s Sungai Budi Group, AgriS aims to expand to 20,000 hectares of organic coconut and reach initial production of 120 million liters/kilograms.

photo: inside Betrimex processing center

The Global Models

Globally, the evolution of agricultural companies tends to follow a sequence:

trading → raw-material control → deep processing → full ecosystem services.

The starting point—trading—is low margin and high volatility. Once a company can secure raw materials through plantations or contract farming, quality and pricing stabilize. From there, the real margins emerge in refined processing and R&D. The apex is an ecosystem model where the company becomes the “operating system” of the sector: seeds, digital farming tools, traceability, cold chain, finance.

Wilmar, Tate & Lyle and Olam illustrate three different paths up that ladder:

  • Wilmar built massive vertical integration, but it remains capital-heavy with margins below 2%.

  • Tate & Lyle pivoted away from sugar entirely and became a specialist in functional ingredients, posting EBITDA margins above 22%.

  • Olam built global reach, split into two businesses, and converted its commodity arm into cash to reinvest in high-value ingredients—its OFI division being the crown jewel.

Where AgriS Fits

AgriS sits somewhere between stage 3 and the early edge of stage 4. It controls large plantations, has a strong processing base, and is pushing into higher-value products—especially coconut. But its next move isn’t Wilmar-style heavy FMCG. Nor is it pure ingredients like Tate & Lyle. What it increasingly resembles is the Olam/OFI direction: a data-driven, integrated value chain where higher-value structures, not bigger estates, define scale.

The company is building a farmer-data platform, expanding traceability, and working on supply-chain finance in cooperation with banks. These are not add-ons; they are strategic scaffolding for becoming a sector orchestrator.

Several indicators support this shift:

  • refined-product revenue share continues to rise

  • more hectares meet international-standard certification

  • farmer profiles in the data system grow quarter by quarter

  • traceable exports form a meaningful share of total export revenue

  • supply-chain finance contracts are being deployed in practice, not on paper

If the company succeeds, it will act less like a producer and more like the “brain” coordinating farmers, mills, banks, R&D and export markets.

The Hard Part

None of this is guaranteed. Digital agriculture is expensive. Changing farming practices is slow. Governance, compliance and international certification add operational pressure. Margins in agriculture—typically 5–15% gross and 1–5% net—leave little room for error. Capital raising remains difficult, especially in emerging markets.

This is where ESG becomes a lever, not a slogan. Green financing reduces capital costs over time and forces organizational discipline. As Omi writes in Right to Win, even modestly cheaper financing, when sustained for a decade, can transform a company’s entire governance capability.

Climbing the Next Rung

The shift from selling products to offering platforms is a long arc. AgriS has placed itself at the “stage 3.5” inflection point—far enough along to see the shape of the next rung but not yet fully across it. The company’s direction is clear: less commodity exposure, more refined value, more data, more traceability, more integration.

Whether it can complete that climb will depend on execution and on whether Vietnam’s policy environment supports the kind of data transparency and financing mechanisms required for ecosystem-scale agriculture.

What’s certain is that AgriS is no longer simply a sugarcane company. It is trying to write a new chapter—one where technology, ESG, and smarter value chains matter as much as land and yields.

—Vietnam Vanguard Editorial Board
November 15th, 2025