As a Vietnamese, I despise Vingroup to the core. They represent all the worst things that have been done to my country for the last 20 years, and their recent NASDAQ nonesense has tarnished the image of Vietnamese companies for years to come.
Mr. Vuong is singlehandedly responsible for the massive and irreversible damage to our country's real estate market, driving the price of real estate to stupendous levels. An average 2 room apartment in Hanoi or HCMC now cost more than 2 billion VND, while average salary is only 10 million. With the high real estate price comes the high rent and high costs of living, making it impossible for young people to save enough money to buy their own houses.
Mr. Vuong's main business is real estate, and boy is it profitable. He buys agricultural land for a penny, then draws up a project, then sells the houses for a dollar even before the houses are built. And if you visit one of Vingroup's projects, you will find a dystopian expanse of either rows upon rows of white, gravestone-like neoclassical houses, or forests of high-rises with a few trees thrown in for contrast.
Mr. Vuong also runs his businesses like a village market stall. One day he is making gasoline cars, the next day electric, then batteries the day after. There is not a single Vietnamese thing about his cars. The parts, the management, the design, the tech are all foreign. And how do you expect to make good products - and such a complex product - when you throw them away after only 2 years?
The real Vietnamese car manufacturer is Truong Hai Auto, which has decades of experience in assembling cars for Japanese brands, then they started making trucks, buses and vans by themselves. They have the engineers, the tech, and the experience. Vinfast has none. Its recent NASDAQ bid is just a stunt to sell bonds in Vietnam, and the Indonesian plant is just the same.
Another terrible thing that he did: giving control of the retail market to foreign companies. First he drove all of the mom-and-pop groceries shops and Vietnamese-owned supermarkets under, undercutting them with all that real estate money. Then after Vinmart took over the retail market, he sold it to a Thailand company for profit.
Vingroup is an evil corporation. But the hour of reckoning is coming. They are in debt, and they are no longer trusted by investors. Vingroup's new projects are empty of people living there. They are just concrete graveyards.
In the children's story Matilda, Matilda's father tells her how he sells his cars. He fills the engines with a mixture of sand and oil. It makes them sound amazing and run wonderfully - but only for as long as they take to sell, after which the engines seize up and then disintegrate completely beyond repair. Matilda questions the morality of the whole enterprise, which her father, of course, struggles to appreciate. As long as the customers get far enough away that they can't come back to demand a refund, then it's not his problem.
This mentality defines VinGroup. Make it look good, but don't worry about whether it actually is any good. Tell everyone it is top quality, but don't worry about what's happening under the bonnet or beneath plaster. Then the suckers who buy the cars and houses will be none the wiser, and you'll be off to the bank with their money before they realise they've been left holding a worthless piece of junk.
The vast swathes of real estate theyve built were never built for people to live in. They were built for suckers to buy and then sell at a profit a few years later. As such, they're not built to last more than a few years, and definitely not built to last if no one is living in them. You'll soon have entire developments crumbling, and people who spent billions left with bank loans and interest, no savings, and a property that's basically worthless.
As the OP mentioned, the net effect has been to drive up property prices, pushing millions of young Vietnamese out of the market snd I to rental. Meanwhile, savings and capital are propping up a housing market building houses that'll fall down in the next few years. The long term effects will be an economy starved of liquidity and a country scarred by half built crumbling real estate developments.
VFS cars are the same. They look good, but it's clear from the reviews that they actually aren't much good. That's not s problem in Vietnam where people have less experience of good cars and bad cars, where you can bribe the media for good reviews and where you can wrap your cars in lazy nationalism. But take it outside the country and you'll be quickly found out and exposed, which is exactly whats happened to Vin. Perhaps he got drunk on his own hubris and figured he couldn't fail, but the whole business model is built on short termism, greed, superficiality and nationalism.
The ultimate losers will be the ordinary people of Vietnam and the huge population of young people in particular, who work hard six days a week for $500 a month, and yet are excluded from building their own futures. And that's the real tragedy of the whole thing.