VinFast Is Mostly Selling Cars To Itself

Photo: VinFast

A majority of the 11,300 electric vehicles VinFast has sold worldwide this year were to… itself. Barron’s reports that over 7,000 EVs were bought by Green and Smart Mobility. It’s a Vietnamese taxi company that is – you guessed it – controlled by Vingroup, owners of VinFast. The news comes from a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that also shows some wild information about who owns VinFast stock, but we will get to that in a second.

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The Tuesday filing indicates sales to Green and Smart Mobility totaled $6.3 million in the first quarter of 2023. The outlet says total first-quarter sales came to about $84 million. That means most of Green and Smart’s purchases probably came in the second quarter. VinFast told Barron’s it’s going to release those numbers at a later date.

VinFast and Green and Smart Mobility are both controlled by Vingroup VIC and Vingroup’s former chairman Pham Nhat Vuong. He directly owns about 51 percent of Vingroup stock, and he currently serves as the board chair at VinFast, according to the outlet.

About 1.2 billion of VinFast’s 2.3 billion shares outstanding are held by Vingroup. A further 1.1 billion shares of the automaker are held directly by Vietnam Investment Group – which lists Vuong as the sole shareholder, and Asia Star, another investment entity controlled by Vuong. Do some quick math and look at some SEC filings, and you’ll soon find out that he effectively controls 99.7 percent of all VinFast stock.

Barron’s says this helps to explain why VinFast stock has been such an up-and-down rollercoaster since the company completed its merger with a special-purpose acquisition company in early August. Just 0.3 percent of the stock outstanding is actually available to trade.

The outlet reports the filing done on Tuesday was in order to register about 11 million shares for sale. It’s a secondary sale from existing shareholders. Most of the stock is connected to the SPAC merger and exercise of stock warrants. That means sales will increase the number of shares available to trade in an effort to slow down all that nasty volatility.

On August 14th – a day before the company changed its stock symbol to VFS – shares closed at $10.45. On August 28th, shares hit a wild high of $93. That gave the company a market cap of about $215 billion based on the 2.3 million shares outstanding after the merger. It’s a bigger market cap than just about every legacy automaker ever. As of right now, shares have returned to earth – and then some. Prices are sitting right about $17.20-ish per share at the time of publication.

So, between the fact that most of VinFast’s cars have been sold to itself and the idea that 99.7 percent of its stock is owned by effectively one guy, the Vietnamese automaker is in an incredibly weird spot – one we haven’t really ever seen another automaker in before.