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Vietnamese billionaire Pham Nhat Vuong has gotten loads richer over the past month.
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VinFast Auto stock has skyrocketed since its public debut, and Vuong owns 99% of the corporate.
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Here’s how Pham Nhat Vuong built his greater than $60 billion fortune.
The rollercoaster ride in VinFast Auto stock has put a highlight on the electrical vehicle maker’s founder and chairman, Pham Nhat Vuong.
VinFast went public via a SPAC IPO earlier this month, and its stock price swiftly soared 830% from $10 per share to a record high of $93.
Despite selling only 24,000 vehicles last yr, VinFast was value nearly $200 billion at its peak on Monday, briefly making it the world’s third largest automaker as measured by market valuation.
And since Vuong, 55, owns a whopping 99% of the Vietnam-based electric vehicle maker, his fortune has soared, on paper a minimum of. Since its peak, shares of VinFast are down 70%, giving the corporate a $62 billion market valuation.
Even with the sharp decline in VinFast stock, that also gives Vuong a complete net value of greater than $60 billion. He was already a billionaire before VinFast went public, with various estimates of his net value between $4 billion and $7 billion.
Before becoming an EV mogul, Vuong began with food.
Selling noodles in Ukraine
He graduated from the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute in Russia in 1993. Sensing opportunity within the post-Soviet Union world, Vuong moved to Kharkiv, Ukraine, borrowed $10,000 from family and friends, and opened up a Vietnamese restaurant.
While the restaurant floundered, he found near quick success in making and selling quick noodles, which were a latest concept in Ukraine and proved to be incredibly popular from the beginning.
“Ukrainians were very poor, and really hungry,” Vuong said in an interview with Forbes in 2013.
He then ditched his restaurant and as an alternative focused on build up his noodle business. He founded Technocom, expanded his dried foods production, and sold quick noodles in Ukraine under the Mivina brand name.
By the point Vuong sold Technocom to Nestle in 2010 for $150 million, the corporate had reached annual revenues of greater than $100 million.
Vuong sees opportunity in Vietnam
After striking success in Ukraine, he set his eyes on his home country. Vuong noticed that Vietnam was undergoing an analogous shift to Ukraine, as its economy transitioned from a state-run system to a more markets-based economy within the late Nineteen Nineties.
He began to funnel his profits from his Ukrainian noodle business into real estate development projects in Vietnam.
And he hit the jackpot.
Vuong’s first real estate enterprise was an undeveloped island just off the coast of Vietnam. There, he helped develop the luxurious Vinpearl Resort that originally had 225 rooms. Vuong eventually added one other 260 rooms to Vinpearl, together with a two-mile cable automotive that connected the island to the mainland. Business boomed and the island has since turn out to be a hot spot for luxury resorts, and Vuong got in on the bottom floor.
He further diversified his real estate holdings by developing office towers, luxury townships, and shopping malls in Hanoi. Vuong has since consolidated most of his assets into the corporate Vingroup, which is a conglomerate that has exposure to the healthcare, entertainment, and technology industries, amongst others.
In 2013, Vuong became Vietnam’s first billionaire, based on Forbes. Vingroup generated $5.4 billion in revenue and $83 million in profits in 2022.
Vuong’s VinFast ambitions
With Vuong’s fortune built, he’s now focusing his efforts on owning a slice of the electrical mobility market with VinFast. The corporate manufactures and sells electric scooters and cars, and it has an ambitious goal to interrupt into the US market.
VinFast recently broke ground on a $4 billion manufacturing plant in North Carolina, and Vuong has pledged his resources to creating the corporate a hit.
“Our ultimate goal is to create a world brand,” he told Bloomberg in 2019. Vuong vowed in April to offer Vinfast with $2.5 billion in capital to assist fuel its growth.
“Whatever VinFast needs, Vingroup at all times supports,” VinFast CEO Le Thi Thu Thuy told the Financial Times before it went public.
But the corporate has quite a lot of work to do. VinFast expects to sell about 50,000 electric vehicles in America this yr, but the early reviews of their first US models weren’t great. Meanwhile, VinFast continues to be unprofitable after six years in business
Still, Vuong is set.
“It’s going to be a really difficult road, and we can have to place in quite a lot of effort. But there’s just one road ahead,” he said in 2019.
Read the unique article on Business Insider