If you saw this car on the road, you probably wouldn’t do a double take. Indeed, you probably wouldn’t even do a single take.
The financial world has, because the manufacturer of the above car, VinFast, has raced up in value to nearly $200 billion. Let me put that fact another way: (1) take the value of General Motors (2) Take the value of Ford (3) Combine them (4) DOUBLE that figure (5) That’s LESS THAN the value of VinFast, which is a new electric car maker from Vietnam. Feeling woozy yet?
Now don’t get me wrong. When I was a child, Vietnam was overrun by Communists and was engaged in a vicioius, brutal war with the U.S. The fact that they have gone balls-out capitalist is fantastic, and I stand on my chair and applaud them. I hope they meet with great success. However, I think a fifth of a trillion dollar valuation is simply insane and, if nothing else, demonstrates that the stock market is still unhinged.
I read up on the company (which is just one of dozens of “Vin-_” organizations that exists in the conglomerate, and it turns out they bought 2,000 acres in Chatham county of North Carolina to build their auto plant in the US. I didn’t know where that was, so I checked, and – – lo and behold!! – – it’s right next door to where I am right now! Small world.
In any case, I suspect in a few months we will look back on VFS the same way we look back on the sandwich shop with $170,000 in revenues that was valued at a couple hundred million dollars, or the Long Island Iced Tea company which, during Bitcoin fever, changed its named to Long Island Blockchain and was briefly worth a fortune. The world seriously never changes. This is just the latest incarnation of a goofy valuation, in this instance driven by the fact they’ve only released 1% of their common stock for trading.
