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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.
