Thế Giới Di Động Brand Guidelines: A Web Address That Became Mobile World

A website and three small shops in Ho Chi Minh City.

Thế Giới Di Động — Vietnamese for “Mobile World” — began in Ho Chi Minh City in March 2004. Vietnamese Wikipedia says the company started with an early e-commerce model: a website giving product information, plus three small shops on Hoàng Văn Thụ street where customers could complete a purchase. In October 2004 it changed course and put its money into one large shop on Nguyễn Đình Chiểu street, and by March 2006 it had four stores in the city. English Wikipedia names Nguyễn Đức Tài and partners as the founders, and the company’s own history says it was set up as Mobile World Co., Ltd. and opened its first thegioididong.com store in Ho Chi Minh City.

Outside capital shaped the next stage. The private-equity firm Mekong Capital invested in 2007, Vietnamese Wikipedia says, and the company’s investor-relations site says the investment came with a conversion into a joint-stock company. Vietnamese Wikipedia puts the chain at 40 stores in 2009 and 220 stores across Vietnam by the end of 2012, and says that in May 2013 it took further investment from CDH Electric Bee Limited and from a former international head of an American electronics retailer.

On 14 July 2014 the parent, Mobile World Investment Corporation, listed its shares on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange under the ticker MWG, the company says; English Wikipedia also dates the listing to July 2014. By then, according to the company’s history, thegioididong.com had reached all 63 of Vietnam’s provinces and cities.

The name works as both a brand and an address. The phone chain trades as thegioididong.com, the Vietnamese name written as a web domain, and Vietnamese Wikipedia describes it as a brand of the joint-stock company Thế Giới Di Động, known in English as Mobile World. Vietcetera wrote in November 2021 that Mobile World is “known locally as Thế Giới Di Động.”

From phones to appliances, Apple stores and Indonesia.

Phones were only the start. At the end of 2010 the company moved into consumer electronics with a chain called Dienmay.com, which later became Điện Máy Xanh, Vietnamese Wikipedia says; “điện máy” is the everyday Vietnamese term for electrical appliances, and “xanh” means green. In 2017 it moved to buy the northern electronics chain Trần Anh; Vietnamese Wikipedia says the merger was completed in October 2018 and the 34 Trần Anh stores were rebranded as Điện Máy Xanh. Tuoi Tre News reported in August 2024 that MWG had dissolved Trần Anh Digital World JSC, the company it bought, which had once partnered with Japan’s Nojima on Japanese-style electronics stores in the north.

New formats followed. On 22 October 2021, the day the iPhone 13 went on sale in Vietnam, Mobile World opened four TopZone stores in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, a chain selling only Apple products, Vietcetera reported. It started with the Apple Authorized Retailer model, placing TopZone stores alongside existing Thế Giới Di Động or Điện Máy Xanh shops, with larger independent stores under the Apple Premium Retailer model as the next step, according to the same report. The article also listed side ventures in sporting goods, baby products, clothing and jewellery under Blue-prefixed names. The company says it began testing a small-store format, Điện Máy Xanh Supermini, in mid-2020.

Not every venture lasted. Vietnamese Wikipedia says the company opened a phone store in Phnom Penh under the name BigPhone, later renamed Bluetronics to sell phones and appliances, and closed the Cambodian business in 2023; it also shut its Vuivui e-commerce site in December 2018. In March 2018 it bought 40 percent of the pharmacy chain Phúc An Khang, later renamed An Khang, Vietnamese Wikipedia says. Abroad, it entered Indonesia in January 2023 with EraBlue, a joint venture with PT Erafone Artha Retailindo, part of the Erajaya group; Tuoi Tre News counted 337 EraBlue stores at the end of September 2026.

Design and documentation.

Southeast Asia’s e-commerce platforms present themselves first through their apps. The home screen of a marketplace carries its name, a run of category icons, banners for the current sale and links to payments, top-ups and delivery services, and that screen does much of the work a shop front once did. Tokopedia, which English Wikipedia says took its name from the Indonesian word for “shop” and the word “encyclopedia,” and Bukalapak, whose name means “open a market stall,” both chose plain Indonesian words that describe what the service does.

Shopping-festival dates and partner programmes carry much of the identity beyond the app. Date-named sales, celebrity brand ambassadors and seasonal campaigns appear on the platforms’ own pages and in the local press; Indonesian Wikipedia records Tokopedia’s ambassadors from 2014 onwards. Programmes for small shops, such as Mitra Tokopedia and Mitra Bukalapak for family-run warungs, take the platform name off the screen and onto counters, signs and receipts.

For Vietnam’s retailers — phone and electronics chains, grocery chains and supermarket groups — the store fascia is a public face alongside the app and the website, and the companies’ corporate pages set out their store formats, sister banners and owners. Store counts and formats in this guide are given only as a dated source reports them.

Corporate pages and the press also carry the ownership story, which in this region often changes the brand itself. Tokopedia merged with Gojek into GoTo in May 2021, TechCrunch reported, and in 2024 it took in TikTok Shop’s Indonesian business, while Bukalapak listed in Jakarta in August 2021 and ended its physical-goods marketplace in early 2025. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — founders, owners, listings and mergers — and says plainly when a fact rests only on the company’s own word.

A phone chain now run inside a subsidiary.

The store network has grown and shrunk. Vietcetera put Mobile World at more than 2,700 stores nationwide in November 2021. During a restructuring in late 2023 the group closed about 150 stores, VnExpress International reported in December 2023, leaving 1,100 Thế Giới Di Động and TopZone stores and 2,210 Điện Máy Xanh stores. By mid-2024 the Thế Giới Di Động and TopZone chain had 1,046 locations, Tuoi Tre News reported.

The phone and appliance chains now sit in a subsidiary. In October 2026 Tuoi Tre News described Dien May Xanh Investment JSC as the electronics retail subsidiary of Mobile World Investment Corporation, and reported that at the end of September 2026 the Điện Máy Xanh, Thế Giới Di Động and TopZone chains had a combined 3,003 stores, with the company app counting 19.6 million members. Vietnam News reported in March 2026 that the parent was reorganising its retail business into specialised units, and that after-sales repairs are offered through a network called Thợ Điện Máy Xanh. Leadership has changed as well: in March 2019 Trần Kinh Doanh became chief executive while Nguyễn Đức Tài stayed on as chairman, Vietnamese Wikipedia says.

The parent also runs a grocery chain, Bách Hóa Xanh, which the company says it began piloting in late 2015, and the An Khang pharmacies. English Wikipedia lists these alongside thegioididong.com, Điện Máy Xanh, TopZone and EraBlue as the group’s main operations.

For a design guide, Thế Giới Di Động shows how a shop name written as a web address can carry a national chain and a family of sister formats. Compare Bách Hóa Xanh, the group’s grocery chain, and FPT Shop, another Vietnamese phone and electronics retailer. For this guide we use a warm yellow, an ink and a cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Thế Giới Di Động’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.