In 1993 a Vietnamese mathematics graduate arrived in Kharkiv with a scholarship behind him and no plan beyond it. He borrowed US$10,000 from relatives and opened a small restaurant on a street whose name he still did not know.
The restaurant did not hold his interest for long. Within two years he had borrowed again to open Technocom, a small plant making instant noodles from Vietnamese recipes on Ukrainian wheat, sold under a brand he called Mivina.1
Mivina became the noodle of the post-Soviet 1990s, stacked in grocery queues across a country still learning what a supermarket was. By 2009 Technocom employed 1,900 people, and Nestle wanted it.
Pham Nhat Vuong sold for roughly US$150 million and moved the proceeds to Hanoi.
Read closely, that single sale carries the whole company. It taught a noodle maker that the founder who owns the entire chain never has to explain a bad quarter to anyone he has not already chosen.
Vingroup now reads as a skyline more than a company. Vinhomes towers rise over Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vinpearl resorts line the coast.
Vuong runs most of it from a headquarters that rarely lets a journalist inside.
He gives almost no interviews and has never explained a strategy on the record. Forbes still put his fortune at US$34.1 billion in April 2026, the largest in Vietnam by a wide margin.
VinFast is the newest and least finished part of that skyline, and it is losing money the way Technocom once made it: fast, and for now, by design. Its net loss widened to US$1.12 billion in the first quarter of 2026, from US$700.4 million a year earlier, even as revenue grew 42 percent and deliveries reached 58,577 vehicles. Gross margin ran negative 73.6 percent.
A public company bleeding at that rate answers to shareholders who can force a slower rollout or a different chief executive. Vuong built VinFast so that vote never has to happen.
In November 2024 he and Vingroup put up to US$3.5 billion behind the carmaker without touching outside capital. Vuong personally pledged US$2.1 billion (VND50 trillion). Vingroup added a US$1.4 billion credit line and converted roughly US$3.3 billion of existing VinFast loans into preferred shares that pay dividends instead of demanding repayment.
The exposure has only grown since. By the middle of 2025, Vingroup’s total liabilities had reached US$31 billion, 86 percent of its assets, with interest running near US$3.2 million a day.
To keep new credit flowing, Vuong pledged Vingroup’s own production lines in Haiphong, the VinES battery plant in Ha Tinh, and the still unfinished VinFast plant in North Carolina as collateral. US$510 million of the resulting loans, from Deutsche Bank and the Asian Development Bank, went straight to VinFast.
Between 2020 and mid-2025 the group had pledged roughly US$17 billion (VND414.4 trillion) in assets this way, close to half of everything Vingroup owns on paper.
A pledge is a loss the bank has not called yet.
A pledge is a loss the bank has not called yet.
The bet still has fuel. Vingroup’s consolidated revenue rose 72 percent in the first half of 2026, and Vinhomes said its second-quarter profit more than tripled on a stronger property market.
TIME and Statista ranked Vingroup 340th on their World’s Best Companies 2026 list this month, up from 817th a year ago. The real-estate engine that once had nothing to do with electric cars is what still pays for them.
Expect Vuong to convert another tranche of VinFast’s loans into preferred shares before Vingroup closes its 2026 books, the same instrument he used in 2024. A US$1.12 billion quarterly bleed cannot reach the break-even he has promised the market without one more infusion that never asks the market’s permission.
The market was never supposed to get a vote on VinFast. Vuong built the company so it would not need one.
The market was never supposed to get a vote on VinFast. Vuong built the company so it would not need one, and every factory he pledges to keep that true is a factory a bank could one day take instead.
Footnotes
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Vietnamese and Ukrainian retrospectives disagree on Technocom’s founding year, some giving 1993 and others 1995; Vuong, who gives almost no interviews, has never settled the record himself. ↩