VinFast Hits Wall Street
But can it survive America?
Good morning! Hello to all new readers, and welcome to the latest edition of the Vietnam Weekly, written by reporter Mike Tatarski. Today’s issue is exclusively for paying subscribers - if you aren’t one, you can subscribe below for US$5/month or US$50/year. That gets you access to all future paid articles, plus the full newsletter archive dating back five years.
At the end of July, I said I wouldn’t cover VinFast again until something big happened. Here we are.
On to the news.
On Tuesday, after many months of discussion and convoluted steps, VinFast debuted on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.
This followed the August 10 approval of a merger between Black Spade Acquisition Company (BSAQ) and VinFast (VFS) that allowed the carmaker to list through a SPAC, a type of deal that has fallen out of favor over the last two years.
VFS shares opened at US$22 and closed at US$37.06, bringing the company’s market cap to a truly unbelievable US$85 billion, higher than Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, Honda, Ford, and General Motors. (This is based on the fanciful US$23 billion valuation VinFast gave itself during the SPAC process despite selling just 137 EVs in the U.S. through June.)
While the listing is being celebrated by the company, a lot is going on (forgive the pun) underneath the hood. Today we’ll look at how the VFS ticker came to be, the role Vingroup’s electric taxi company plays in all this, VinFast’s factory groundbreaking in North Carolina, and in-depth media coverage they have no experience with in Vietam.