Op-Ed: “Wild East” Gamble — Why VinFast is Burning Cash to Reach the Stars

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CleanTechnica is all for renewables and electrification.

We exist to remind humans of the Earth and to rid it of smoke belchers, offensive energy generation, and climate deniers. Idealistic as we are, we are also grounded in the truth that this will never happen quickly enough, and will happen mostly out of necessity.

And if you read the stories here, we question, oftentimes lambast, sometimes expose, but mostly praise and give credit where credit is due. I just have to say this to set the tone for this piece.

When I received the latest unaudited reports from VinFast last September, I asked them if I could get an audited report before I started writing my opinion on VinFast and where it is going—at least in the market where it intended to grow the fastest and the biggest—right here in the USA. Elsewhere in the world, they are seeping (that’s the word) into the market. Intentionally slow, I guess. But never overly cautious.

The reports never arrived, but that won’t stop a story. And it seems nothing will stop VinFast’s push into the US, a push recently highlighted by its aggressive presence at major events like the Electrify Expo, a vital step in re-establishing the brand after some missteps, which includes bad press on the VF8.

Now, I found two reasons to write this piece: 1) the residual value program the company is running in the Philippines and Indonesia; 2) and even more profoundly, space exploration.

Yes, VinGroup is now looking at the heavens for expansion, investing in a new company called VinSpace Joint Stock Company. According to Reuters, who broke the story, the new VND300 billion ($11,840,000) venture will be involved in space-related activities, specifically telecommunication satellite operations and scientific research.

Doesn’t that sound like burning cash?

Recently, CleanTechnica revisited their plant in Vietnam for the third time and compared notes between 2022 and 2025. There is great progress in manufacturing, research, and development back in Vietnam. This wasn’t just progress; it was transformative, at the very least.

Not financial advice

I am not a finance guy, so this story was developed with a lot of help from an auditor friend (whose name I cannot mention) to make me understand what the rows and columns of numbers imply. The numbers themselves were staggering, but two distinct impressions came to mind to me as a non-finance guy.

First, my thought is: this company is crazy. This level of financial risk is matched only by their history of audacity. I have covered the brand since 2017 when they held a contest to present to the Vietnamese people designs for the new national car, which was later to become the Lux A2.0 and Lux SA 2.0.

Imagine that. Instead of just getting a few heads together in the design phase, they elicited the help of the whole nation, with 60,000 citizens casting votes.

I realized that over time, the company was losing money at such a breathtaking pace that any other car company would have executives exiting or scrambling for solutions. VinFast executives seem to be sleeping just fine.

I asked a finance expert friend and journalist to tell me what the Vietnamese automaker’s latest unaudited financial report means. He said if we look at it historically, it is simply good investing. He pointed out how Tesla suffered losses too, both capital and operational. He framed the reports as a masterclass in strategic spending: take enormous losses now to dominate the global EV market later.

Wild, Wild East

The current numbers tell a wild story. (Note: not audited, not updated since September 10, 2025.)

VinFast delivered 72,167 EVs in the first half of 2025—a staggering 223% jump from the same period last year. Add in their e-scooters and e-bikes, and they’re moving serious volume: 114,484 two-wheelers delivered, up 447% year-over-year. Revenue hit $663 million in the second quarter alone, nearly doubling from last year. With 394 showrooms now spread across the globe, it’s the kind of operational breakthrough that should have investors celebrating.

The most recent press release said “VinFast continues to break records in the domestic automotive market by successfully delivering 20,380 electric cars of various models in October 2025, bringing the total number of VinFast vehicles delivered nationwide to 124,264 units in the first 10 months of the year.”

Those figures are real.

Crucially, many of those cars are “sales” to a related entity: the GSM taxi service—an enormously successful endeavor in the countries it has located in. While the money moves from one corporate pocket to another, it represents significant volume and real-world testing that boosts the delivery figures.

Instead, the bottom line looks like a financial disaster zone. But it that true?

Everything or nothing

But here’s the thing—this is pure Pham Nhat Vuong.

The billionaire chairman has made it crystal clear he’s willing to lose whatever it takes to make VinFast succeed. You don’t hear that from the overly cautious American car executive scared of the stock backlash of such an announcement.

Mother company VinGroup decides fast. And good son VinFast carries out the orders quickly. I was sitting in their Hanoi offices in 2022 when the memo went out: no more internal combustion engines. Period. While Tesla was the only major new-world automaker brave enough—or insane enough (like Nissan)—to bet everything on electric, here was a Vietnamese startup that had barely figured out conventional cars making the same all-or-nothing wager.

With Vuong on record saying he’ll burn through more money if necessary, those staggering quarterly losses start looking less like financial mismanagement and more like a deliberate war chest being deployed. Every dollar of loss is deliberate, part of a $2 billion gamble that most Americans will eventually buy cars from a brand they can’t pronounce. The company is torching cash on three massive fronts: building a network of shiny showrooms from California to Germany, launching marketing blitzes to convince skeptical buyers that “Vietnamese luxury EV” isn’t an oxymoron, and funding R&D labs working around the clock on next-generation vehicles.

“Live long and prosper”

The intentions behind VinSpace are probably the “highest” possible form of ambition. With Mr. Spock’s Vulcan salute, “live long and prosper.”

Down on Earth, its sprawling Hai Phong facility continues to churn out cars, while its American manufacturing intentions rising on a North Carolina farmland are temporarily on hold. This facility isn’t just a factory—it’s VinFast’s entire American dream materialized in steel and concrete. If it works, the company dodges crushing import tariffs and slashes shipping costs while planting a flag in the world’s most competitive car market.

It is here that the delays—seen as one of those much-lambasted missteps—took on a cosmic, almost divine meaning.

When Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina in late 2024, the state’s infrastructure and construction environment ground to a halt. The VinFast site, though physically protected from the worst of the floods, was months away from significant vertical construction. Some internal observers must have quietly considered the delay an unexpected form of “divine providence,” sparing a multi-billion-dollar build from potential catastrophic disruption. If it doesn’t work, well, that’s a massive failure.

The brutal math is simple: VinFast is paying the astronomical (no pun intended) price of admission to play with Tesla, GM, and Ford. The company’s bet is that today’s financial bloodbath will look like pocket change once they’re manufacturing hundreds of thousands of EVs annually — whether that’s in Vietnam, Indonesia, India, or on good ol’ American soil.