After Didi, Asia's largest IPO came.
The investment community has learned that Vietnamese electric vehicle company VinFast has secretly submitted an IPO application to the US SEC. It is reported that VinFast may seek to raise $2 billion through an IPO, after foreign media reported that its valuation could reach up to $60 billion, which will be the largest IPO in Vietnam's history.
Standing behind VinFast is 53-year-old Vietnam's richest man, Phan Il Wan. Similar to Xu Jiayin, Pan Riwang also started from real estate to build cars, but he succeeded - under the leadership of CEO Li Shiqiushui, VinFast has delivered the first electric car and built factories in the United States and Germany.
With a minimum price of 260,000 yuan, VinFast is often referred to as the "Tesla of Asia." Different from the domestic Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal, VinFast has been working on the US and European markets since its inception. With a large number of talents and capital gathered in Europe and the United States behind him, will VinFast become a fierce enemy of China's new energy vehicles? It seems that the time has come for China's new car-making forces to go to sea to train troops.
The 53-year-old is Vietnam's richest man to build a car
Led by female CEOs, the valuation rushed to 380 billion
Who is VinFast?
It is a vietnam-based private automotive start-up founded in 2017. Strictly speaking, VinFast was the first Vietnamese car brand to produce electric vehicles, and the first Vietnamese car brand to enter the global market.
The story begins with Pham Nhat Vuong, 53, Vietnam's richest man. In the 1960s, Pan Ri Wang was born into an ordinary family in Ha Tinh Province, central Vietnam, living in difficult conditions, but he succeeded in his studies and was admitted to the Hanoi University of Mining and Geology. In the early years, Pan Riwang was sent to study in the Soviet Union, and later lived in Moscow and Kharkiv, Ukraine, for many years, where Helwang cobbled together $10,000 and opened a Vietnamese restaurant.
Pan Riwang was constantly looking for opportunities around him, and soon he found that Ukrainians were particularly in demand for cheap, full-bodied instant noodles, so he gave up the restaurant and invested with friends to set up a food company called Technocom, launching the fast food brand Divina. That's how the first pot of gold was earned.
Pan Riwang's food company has gradually expanded its scale, expanded a number of businesses, and exported to dozens of countries. Returning to Vietnam in 2002, Phan Ri-Wan founded Vincom in Hanoi, which develops large shopping malls, high-end office buildings and apartments, and then Vinpear, which creates five-star hotels, luxury resorts, beach villas, water parks and golf courses. In 2012, he merged Vincom and Vinpear, and Vingroup was born.
Wenner Group's business covers real estate, supermarket retail, tourism and entertainment, life and health, smart phones and other aspects, and was successfully listed on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange in 2007. With the Winner Group, Pan Ri Wang became the richest man in Vietnam, and he was also the first Vietnamese boss to be listed on the Forbes Rich List, known as "Vietnam Li Ka Shing".
Soon, the richest man also set his sights on building cars. In 2017, Pan Riwang founded VinFast in the remote rural county of Gehai, and before VinFast, there was not even a real national automobile company in Vietnam.
VinFast is ambitious, and since its inception, Pan Riwang has targeted the international market. Back in July 2018, VinFast opened a German office in Frankfurt and soon in Paris; purchased Horton's former testing ground in Australia; a center in California to develop the new technology it needs for electric vehicles; and a U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles.
In January 2022, after VinFast CEO Michael Lohscheller left and returned to Europe, the company welcomed a new CEO, Le Thi Thuy, a female automotive executive in the global spotlight.
Prior to that, after graduating from his MBA, Lai served as Vice President of Lehman Brothers in Japan. In fact, Lai has spent most of his career at Vingroup, holding related positions in industry, technology, finance, investment and international relations. It was under her leadership that VinFast raised more than $1 billion from investors and also forged partnerships with General Motors, hiring top engineers and designers from traditional car brands like Toyota.
It can be said that on the road of internationalization of VinFast, Li's Qiushui has contributed an indispensable role.
Now, VinFast has launched a listing in the United States, according to Reuters, which is valued at $60 billion (about 382.2 billion yuan), and if successful, VinFast will become the largest IPO in Vietnam.
A 250,000 yuan, benchmark Tesla
Sold the car to the United States
How is VinFast doing?
Looking back at VinFast's car-making process, few people may know that the core of the power system of its first model, LUX A2.0, is actually the BMW N20 turbocharged engine that was discontinued in 2017, until 2018, with the help of Germany's Siemens, VinFast got the parts production qualification of electric buses in Southeast Asia and truly entered the field of electric vehicle manufacturing.
Relying on these internal combustion engine OEM vehicles, VinFast announced an annual production capacity of 250,000 units at the end of 2018, becoming the first national automobile brand in Vietnam's history to have mass production capabilities. In 2020, VinFast squeezed into the top five of Vietnam's auto sales charts, behind Hyundai, Toyota, Kia and Honda.
VinFast didn't start out with pure electric. According to the strategic planning of VinFast and VinGroup, 2017 to 2019 is the founding stage, 2020 and 2021 are the acceleration phase, and 2022 is the globalization phase. Among them, the acceleration stage refers to "stopping the development of fuel models and turning to the development of VF series electric models" - VinFast previously had only 4 models on sale, all of which were fuel vehicles.
In 2021, VinFast launched its first electric model, the VF e34, and on this basis extends the VF 5, VF 6, VF 7 and VF 8 and VF 9 models, covering a wide range of models from A to D class. Also in this year, in the context of the overall decline in brand sales of Japanese and Korean car companies and the overall shrinkage of the Vietnamese car market, VinFast still recorded a sales growth of 54.4%.
At a press conference in Las Vegas in early 2022, Le Thi Thuy, global CEO of VinFast, announced that VinFast would become a pure electric vehicle professional. That is to say, the complete abandonment of fuel vehicles. Lai's Qiushui also revealed that the large SUV "VF8" and "VF9" have begun to obtain orders in Vietnam, the United States and Europe.
The internationalization strategy is an important feature of VinFast that distinguishes it from the new chinese car-making forces. The U.S. is one of VinFast's particularly important markets. In November 2021, VinFast opened its U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles. In March, VinFast announced the construction of an electric vehicle production plant and a battery production plant in North Carolina, and Biden posted on his U.S. president's Twitter account that VinFast has invested $4 billion in the construction of the factory, which will bring about 7,000 jobs to the United States.
In fact, the first model of VinFast was designed entirely by the Italian Pininfarina, the German BMW and the Austrian Magna Steyr. It is understood that VinFast has also determined that a new electric vehicle factory will be built in Germany, and the Vietnamese side is currently negotiating with the German Foreign Trade and Investment Agency, and it is expected that Lower Saxony, where Volkswagen's headquarters wolf castle is located, has a greater advantage.
In 2018, VinFast brought in Beckham to endorse him
Like the current domestic new forces, Vinfast has some more attractive configurations, such as AI intelligent voice assistants, intelligent value, internet of vehicles and so on. Of Vinfast's current 1,900 employees, 34 percent are AI and big data employees, 38 percent are hardware designers and development, and 22 percent are software engineers. Vinfast, which has the latest and most modern factory in Vietnam, claims to have an annual production capacity of 250,000 units – the largest capacity of the world's new power.
It is reported that VinFast aims to deliver VF 8 and VF 9 electric crossovers to the outside world this year, the two products that benchmark Tesla's large SUV "Model X", but the price is only about half of Tesla's: VF 8 is priced at $41,000 (about 260,000 yuan), and VF 9 is priced at $56,000 (about 350,000 yuan).
Everything looks like it's going well, but the 2021 earnings report released by VinFast's Wenner Group shows that Vinfast's auto business has suffered huge losses due to sales that did not meet expectations, with a pre-tax loss of nearly $1 billion (about 6 billion yuan) in a year. It can be seen that VinFast is experiencing the encounter of new chinese car-making forces, and is in a huge loss in the early stage.
Who will be The Tesla asia?
Vietnam came, and China Wei Xiaoli went to war
The rise of VinFast is no accident, behind which Vietnam has made a big push for electric vehicles.
Back in July 2014, the Prime Minister of Vietnam approved a decision proposing a development strategy for Vietnam's automotive industry to 2025 and looking ahead to 2035. According to the decision, the Vietnamese government has set a clear target for encouraging the production of eco-friendly vehicles (energy-efficient vehicles, hybrid vehicles, biofuel-powered vehicles, electric vehicles, etc.).
We also see a familiar approach: last year, Vietnam's Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Ministry of Finance jointly proposed to amend the "Special Consumption Tax Law", saying that it would provide consumers with subsidies for the purchase of electric vehicles to promote the popularization and penetration of electric vehicles. Vietnam's Vice Minister of Transport, Le Dinh Thiễn Thieu, has also called for a country of nearly 100 million people, Vietnam's electric vehicles are still underdeveloped and have broad prospects. This is also the reason why VinFast sales have soared.
In foreign media reports, VinFast is often referred to as "Asia's Tesla", one of the reasons is that although the mainland Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal were established early, they are currently limited to the domestic market and are difficult to find abroad. From research and development, production to sales and marketing, VinFast focuses on overseas, so overseas visibility is much ahead of Wei Xiaoli. This is also a place worthy of our vigilance.
In fact, the mainland still occupies a firm voice in this new energy competition. VinFast is bustling overseas, in the final analysis, it lacks a huge domestic market, and going to sea seems to be a helpless move. As one analyst abroad put it, "Usually when we talk about the Asian electric vehicle market, we are mainly talking about China, which still accounts for about 90% of electric vehicle sales." ”
A PE partner who has been dealing with the new energy industry for many years also told the investment community that he believes that there is no so-called curve overtaking, but China's new energy industry is accelerating in a straight line to lead the entire track, "Looking at the electric vehicle track, there is only one Tesla running in front of the foreign countries, and the remaining production and marketing data is almost all Chinese companies." ”
Sitting on the world's largest electric vehicle market, China's new car-making forces are still fierce in 2022. Among them, Xiaopeng Automobile returned to the first throne, delivering a total of 15,414 vehicles in March, an increase of 148% month-on-month and an increase of 202% year-on-year; the cumulative delivery volume in the first quarter reached 34,561 vehicles, 2.6 times that of the same period last year.
Nezha Automobile, which rushed to the second place, delivered 12,026 new vehicles in March, an increase of 270% year-on-year; the cumulative delivery volume in the first quarter reached 30,152 units, an increase of 305% year-on-year. Ideal car, which ranked third, delivered 11,034 units in March, up 125.2% year-on-year, and delivered 31,716 units in the first quarter, up 152.1% year-on-year.
This is a group of opponents that even Tesla is very jealous of.
Not only that, but car-making upstarts from China have set off a wave of IPOs. Just in March this year, Zero Run Auto officially submitted a listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and once successfully listed, it will also become the fourth new car-making force to land on Hong Kong stocks.
Nezha Automobile has also completed a new round of financing of more than 2 billion yuan in February, which is the third round of Nezha's series of financing series, with a post-investment valuation of more than 25 billion yuan. It is reported that Nezha has now started a Pre-IPO round with a target valuation of about 45 billion yuan, or US$7 billion, and plans to launch an IPO in Hong Kong this year.
Also breaking the news of the IPO was Gaohe Automobile. According to the information, Gaohe Automobile is valued at US$4 billion (equivalent to 25.2 billion yuan), and will soon launch a series A financing, followed by a listing in Hong Kong.
Once upon a time, in the face of the menacing Tesla, Weilai, Ideal, and Xiaopeng could be described as "Three British Battles Lü Bu". Now, with the rapid rise of another wave of new forces, it is like a picture of a group of males chasing deer.
Why do we develop new energy vehicles regardless of investment? Looking back at human history, from firewood to coal, from coal to oil and gas, every great progress in human society has been accompanied by an energy revolution. If we want to bid farewell to the oil age and weaken the hegemony of oil, it is necessary to develop new energy, and new energy vehicles are undoubtedly the largest application scenario. In the end, behind the new energy vehicle is a battle of the times, which may go far beyond the car itself.
No one is willing to fall behind.