Pacific Money | Economy | Southeast Asia

Is VinFast’s Costly EV Gambit Coming to an End?

Despite its vaunting ambitions and rapid expansion, the upstart automaker has yet to prove it can compete beyond the Vietnamese market.

Vietnamese EV-maker VinFast is a truly interesting case study. Vietnam has quickly become a manufacturing powerhouse, but its traditional strength has not been building and exporting cars, especially not electric vehicles. So it was quite surprising when VinFast, which is majority owned and controlled by Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup, not only started producing EVs under its own brand but announced in 2022 it would be building a factory in the United States to break into the North American market.

But it didn’t stop there. VinFast began expanding faster than anyone likely thought possible or prudent, building factories in India and Indonesia with an annual production capacity of 50,000 vehicles each. Combined with its two production facilities in Vietnam, VinFast is capable of producing up to 600,000 electric vehicles per year, as long as sufficient demand exists to absorb the output.

Unfortunately, such demand does not exist. At least not yet, and maybe not ever.

According to company filings, VinFast delivered 197,000 EVs in 2025. Eighty-nine percent of these were sold in Vietnam and only 11 percent to international buyers. More than a quarter of VinFast’s sales in 2025 were also made to related parties, meaning companies controlled or affiliated with Vingroup or its billionaire founder Pham Nhat Vuong. This pattern is common in the company’s sales record.

VinFast reports that it has a 36 percent share of the Vietnamese auto market. But despite aggressive expansion, it has yet to prove that it can flourish in more competitive international markets against established brands like Tesla and BYD. Meanwhile, the gutsy but high-risk North American gambit has collapsed. Construction is stalled, and now the North Carolina government is suing VinFast to recoup public funds and get the land back so it can be used for other ventures.

We might call VinFast’s aggressive expansion strategy visionary. But it is an increasingly costly vision, and there is a good reason why few others have tried it. From 2024 to 2025, revenue doubled from $1.8 billion to $3.6 billion, but VinFast continued to lose money regardless. The firm reported negative earnings........

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