Vietnamese EV maker worth more than Ford or GM after US listing | Hacker News Reader

Vietnamese EV maker worth more than Ford or GM after US listing

ft.com

28 pointseatonphil23 comments

From the article:

"VinFast closed at $37.06 in New York on Tuesday, well above the $10 price agreed upon when the carmaker merged with a special purpose acquisition company to secure a stock market listing. Its market capitalisation topped $85bn, at least $27bn higher than either Ford, General Motors or Fiat Chrysler owner Stellantis.

VinFast’s billionaire founder Pham Nhat Vuong owns about 99 per cent of its shares, leaving only a small amount available for trading. Only 1.3mn shares of the Spac were able to be traded after earlier redemptions and just $185mn in shares changed hands, according to analysts."

Pure market shenanigans.

Such few shares being made available makes it sound like they did the Spac just to brag about being listed in the US markets.

> Pham Nhat Vuong owns about 99 per cent of its shares.

This company does not deserve to be called publicly-traded..

Unless I'm mistaken, at $37.06/share, multiplied by 1.3m floating shares, VinFast is only worth $48.2 million.

Does that account for the fact that those shares combined are worth less than 1% of the company?

Are those other 99% shares tasting at this price or are they locked away? If they were included in trading the purchase would likely be significantly lower and so would the valuation

No they're privately owned and not trading.

So that stock price doesn’t apply to them.

If I have 100 total shares of my company, and I put 10% of my company up for sale (10 shares) and the shares trade for $10, then the market has decided my total company is worth $1000.

But market cap is price multiplied by total outsanding shares ( public + privately held shares ).

If you and I IPO a company. We each keep 25% of the shares and float the remaining 50%. Using your logic, our insider shares representing 50% of the company has no value.

Also, if the company were to pay dividends, are our shares not applicable?

You can't calculate the value of a company on just the float, unless the float represents all or most of the shares.

Of course having such a small float is ridiculous as well. Seems like the vinfast stock is exists solely for financial shenanigans behind the scenes.

I deliberately excluded the 99% shares that are still held by the CEO because I think that even the valuation based purely on floated shares grossly overstates the value of the company.

VinFast cars are some of the worst cars ever released in the U.S. Test drive one and you'll understand immediately. (And on that note, VinFast has sold fewer than 200 cars in the U.S. to date.)

Haha - reminds me of Jason Fried's tweet from 2017:

"Basecamp is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1."

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/basecamp-valuation-tops-100-b...

I've said this before and I'll say this again: computing total market capitalization by simply multiplying the last traded price by the number of shares is nonsensical, because it doesn't take into account the fact that the supply and demand of those shares changes with the price. It is taking a marginal value and imputing the total value.

The media and everyone else should stop treating it as a number with any meaning.

Don't tell that to the crypto market.

> computing total market capitalization by simply multiplying the last traded price by the number of shares is nonsensical

It's a quick and easy calculation, and you shouldn't worry too much about it.

Pretty much anyone serious uses a market capitalization number calculated using the number of floating shares (shares actually available for trading by the general public), including all the (serious) index funds.

Everything will be fine :)

EDIT - For example S&P would assign this an IWF of 0.01, meaning it isn't even eligible for the S&P Total Market index fund, let alone the S&P 500:

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/methodologies/me...

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/index-policies/m...

For a well-traded commodity, it's a reasonable extrapolation. We even get to test it sometimes. When a company is sold, the offer price is usually about the same as the current market price. There's usually a small premium because you tip your hand that you want to buy all of it, but it's a factor of 10%, not 2x or 10x.

Shenanigans can flout that. Crypto trading is almost all shenanigans. So is most of the "pink sheets" (penny stocks). When the trading is thin, the metric is easily manipulated.

"On 27 July 2021, parent Vingroup announced that Michael Lohscheller, the CEO of Opel, had been appointed CEO of VinFast Global.Five months later, on 27 December 2021, it was announced that Lohscheller had resigned the position."

I wonder why he left - he probably had some golden handcuffs :).

Thats why everyone wants to list their companies in the US markets. Crazy valuations. Its becoming a problem for the London stock exchange, no one wants to list there anymore, even companies with activies predominantly based in the UK are listing in New York. What was trickle is turning into a torrent.

Here's some detail from CNBC (w/out a paywall)

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/16/ev-maker-vinfast-is-now-wort....

https://archive.li/TX86r

Endless ReCAPTCHA loop: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148681>

Paywall.

and curiously, 12ft ladder doesn't work

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