Julie Nguyen Brown, a Vietnamese immigrant who founded and presided over what was once the largest minority-owned U.S. auto supplier, has died.
A private service for Brown took place Tuesday at Sacred Heart Church in Dearborn, Mich., with Howe-Peterson Funeral Home & Cremation Services handling arrangements.
The family did not release an obituary with information on the date of her death, age or surviving relatives. She was born in 1950 and moved to the U.S. from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, according to an Automotive News story from 2004.
In 1988, Brown founded Plastech Engineered Products Inc. after beginning her career as a product design engineer at Ford Motor Co. The company made several major acquisitions over the years as it accumulated more contracts with automakers in the U.S.
At its height in 2007, Plastech generated automotive revenue of $1.4 billion, according to reports at the time. The company, which supplied parts to 90 percent of vehicles made in North America, once operated as many as 40 plants and employed about 13,500 people, according to Brown’s biography.
Plastech was one of the few major minority- or female-owned companies in the U.S. auto industry. Still, Brown avoided publicity for much of her career and rarely trumpeted her company's growth or accomplishments. Plastech, however, fell on hard times as the Great Recession approached.
Hard times
Plastech filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection early in 2008, after its largest customer, Chrysler LLC, began canceling its contracts with the supplier over concerns about the quality of the injection-molded automotive components it produced. A subsequent court dispute with Chrysler over ownership of the supplier’s tooling ensued, and the company’s assets were eventually sold off to other suppliers such as Johnson Controls and Magna International.
In recent years, Brown continued to operate Plastech Holding Corp., or PHC, a “virtual” company, according to its website. The firm provided its clients in North America, South America and the Middle East with a “critical competitive advantage” in areas such as engineering, styling, pricing and market intelligence on key competitors, the website says.
Brown held a master’s degree in engineering from Wayne State University and a bachelor’s degree from Tulane University.
She was a director of the Washington, D.C.-based Minority Business Roundtable and had served as nonexecutive director of Sunningdale Precision Industries in Singapore, according to Bloomberg Business.
She also was a trustee at Brown University in Rhode Island from 2003 to 2009. Two of her children attended the university as undergraduate students. The Julie Nguyen Brown Professor of Computational and Mathematical Sciences was named for her.
Philip Nussel contributed to this report.
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