Name: Why a Vietnamese EV Maker Is Building a U.S. Factory
Uploaded: 2023-12-19T23:06:00Z
Duration: 6 min 5 s

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VinFast, the Vietnamese EV startup, has ambitions to become a major global carmaker. It started selling its vehicles in the U.S. in March, and its rollout has been troubled since, marked with vehicle recalls and negative reviews. Now, VinFast is taking a big gamble on a manufacturing facility in North Carolina. WSJ reporter Jon Emont joins host Alex Ossola to talk about how VinFast’s gamble might pay off for both the automaker and North Carolina. Photo: Linh Pham for The Wall Street Journal

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Why a Vietnamese EV Maker Is Building a U.S. Factory

Welcome to "Tech News Briefing." It's Tuesday, December 19th, I'm Alex Ossola for the Wall Street Journal. Vietnamese electric vehicle startup Vinfast has its sight set on becoming a major global car company, but its US rollout has been more like a roller coaster. When the company went public on the NASDAQ in August, it was briefly worth more than Ford and GM combined. But the first 999 vehicles shipped to the US were recalled and Vinfast Cars received negative reviews in the American Automotive Press. Now the company is taking a big gamble. It's building a factory for its cars in North Carolina. Here to tell us about it is WSJ Reporter Jon Emont. Jon, tell me more about Vinfast. What should we know about the company?

Vinfast is Vietnam's first EV Baker and the founder of the company. Tham Not Wrong, is one of Vietnam's richest man, and he's got money to play with. It's a fairly new company in Vietnam, started six years ago. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to produce high quality, relatively affordable electric vehicles for people all over the world. It's part of something called the Vin Group, which is a massive conglomerate in Vietnam and they focus on the emerging middle class Vietnam. So fairly wealthy people and they kind of have a premium aura and they're trying to maintain that globally too. So even though you might think that a car from Vietnam would be super cheap, at least the current offers in the United States are for a fairly premium car, some of their models are more expensive than the cheapest Tesla.

How does Vinfast market share compare to other big EV companies like Tesla and BYD?

It's tiny Vinfast delivered something like in the range of 10,000, 11,000 cars for the first six months of this year. So compared to Tesla and BYD, this is a real minnow. They're hoping to become something much bigger. And they attracted a lot of attention, both because they listed on the NASDAQ and for a brief period had a very high valuation. And also they quite quickly started building a factory in North Carolina. And so it immediately raised the question, what is this Vietnamese car company? What are they doing in North Carolina? What are they doing trying to sell to Americans? But right now, in terms of actual sales, it's not a big player.

I mean, it sounds like Vinfast had made this really big splash when they listed on NASDAQ and when they started selling and manufacturing in the US, but how are things going now?

Well, not so great. Their initial offering in the US was widely panned. They got some pretty devastating reviews. Their valuation has plummeted, which is not so unusual. But there was a lot that was just very, very odd about how that listing went down. The extremely high percentage of shares that are controlled by the chairman of the founder of the company, usually companies list, because they're trying to raise a lot of money from the public. And that didn't appear to be the case, given just how much control the chairman of the company had. And in other ways, the company is facing growing pains like a lot of EV makers do. Right now, the market for EVs isn't so hot. Sales have been not great in the US and in many other countries. So in that sense, Vinfast is just up against a lot of headwinds.

What is its broad ambition as a company?

Vinfast's goal is to be a major global automaker and the first Vietnamese global automaker. And Vietnam is a country that has an economy that's growing rather quickly, but it doesn't have any global brands. And the feeling was that Vietnam had never developed a major automaker. It typically imported cars or had cars like Toyotas made locally, but that the transition to EVs was actually an opportunity for a new player to get in the game. And that's why they're moving so quickly because the goal is to just get these cars out there and get people familiar with them.

Okay, so now Vinfast is trying to establish a factory in the US, what will that entail?

That will entail doing things very differently than they do things in Vietnam, so one of the major advantages of being a car maker based in Vietnam is you've got very low labor costs. You're connected to all these Asian supply chains. It's a good place to make stuff. North Carolina's just gonna be very different. Manufacturing wages in the US are typically more than 10 times higher than in Vietnam. So that's something that they're gonna have to deal with. And typically it's hard to replicate the extraordinary efficiencies you can get in a country like Vietnam in the United States. Just think about like land is gonna be so much more expensive. So many things are gonna be so much more expensive and less convenient.

So building this new factory in North Carolina is of course a gamble for the company. In what way is it a gamble for North Carolina too?

It's a gamble because the government of North Carolina and local governments are offering incentives for Vinfast to set up. So if the factory were to go belly up, that would obviously be embarrassing, but potentially some taxpayer money would go down the drain. That said, local government officials, note that a lot of the money is tied to specific benchmarks that the company has to reach. So if, for example, Vinfast doesn't hire the amount of people it's gonna say it's gonna hire, it won't get a lot of the incentives. So the government thinks that it's not too risky because worst case scenario things don't pan out. They probably won't have spent too much money.

That was WSJ Reporter Jon Emont. And that's it for "Tech News Briefing." Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Katherine Millsap. I'm Alex Ossola for the Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.

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