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Comment by throwaway4good | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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

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

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...

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