A fresh round of funding for Vietnamese EV maker VinFast has seen $2.5 billion secured to facilitate its expansion into global markets. The new round of funding comes days after the latest shipment of cars made its way to the United States and Canada. The additional funding is said to assist the company in expanding into other foreign territories, with launches planned in France, Germany, and the Netherlands later this year.
However, the funding may delay a planned IPO in the USA. Plans for the listing were originally floated in 2021, reports Reuters, with the timeline pushed back to the second half of 2022 and later to sometime in 2023. However, the market conditions may still not be considered favorable for the listing, which hopes to raise $2 billion with a company valuation of $60 billion.
Related: VinFast Has Shipped Another 1,879 New VF 8s To North America
Despite starting operations just five years ago, with two offerings based on the BMW F10 5-Series and F15 X5, in 2022 VinFast quickly transitioned into an EV-only company. But investors have grown wary of new EV makers with big promises. While the International Energy Agency expects around one in five new vehicles to be sold to be an EV this year, there remains some trepidation surrounding EV startups after companies with large valuations have been placed under increasing scrutiny.
Exactly $1 billion of the latest round of funding comes from VinFast founder Pham Nhat Vuong — Vietnam’s first billionaire and the richest man in the country. VinFast’s parent company, Vingroup, will provide the rest of the funding with a grant of $500 million plus a loan of $1 billion with a maturity of up to five years.
In its home market, VinFast currently offers six electric cars, an electric bus, and nine electric motorbikes. The VinFast VF 8 and VF 9 are offered in North America, with 65,000 reservations placed for the vehicles, but of that, only some 3,000 units have been shipped. The company also hopes to set up a car and battery plant in the US in the near future.
