Posted: Facebook appoints Vietnamese woman as national director

Facebook has named Le Diep Kieu Trang the director of its Vietnam operations.

Trang, 38, will be in charge of the social network's business development in Vietnam, a Facebook representative told VnExpress on Tuesday.

Kenneth Bishop, managing director of Facebook in Southeast Asia, said with more than 60 million people using Facebook in Vietnam each month, Facebook is investing in human resources to support the business community and its partners in Vietnam.

With her professional experience, Trang, also known as Christy Le, will be able to support companies in Vietnam, he said.

Le Diep Kieu Trang seen in a photo she posted on her own Facebook page.

Trang comes from a family with a long business tradition.

Her father, Le Van Tri, is former deputy CEO of The Southern Rubber Industry Joint Stock Company (Casumina), Vietnam's leading rubber manufacturer, while her brother, Le Tri Thong, is former deputy CEO of Dong A Bank and is currently deputy chairman of Phu Nhuan Jewelry Joint-Stock Company (PNJ).

Trang won scholarships to study at Oxford University in England and then Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the U.S.

She previously worked for global management consulting firm McKinsey in the U.S. before joining her husband to found Misfit Wearables, a startup specializing in keeping track of human health and physical activities that attracted investment from John Sculley, former CEO of Apple, and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing.

Misfit was acquired by Fossil Group for $260 million in 2015, but Trang continued to work as CEO of Fossil Vietnam until early March this year.

Trang will be running Facebook's Vietnam operations from the company's office in Singapore, but it is not yet clear when she will start her new job.

Vietnamese people love social media and half of the population get their news through this channel, a survey of 1,000 Vietnamese people conducted by Pew Research Center found in January.

Vietnam has around 64 million Facebook users, accounting for 3 percent of global Facebookers, according to a report released in July last year by We Are Social, a social media marketing and advertising agency.

More than half of the Vietnamese population of nearly 92 million is online, and people spend more than two hours each day on average on the social media network, said the report.