VinFast
- Shares in VinFast soared on its Spac-led debut in New York Tuesday, leaving it worth $85 billion.
- The Vietnamese EV carmaker has sunk since then, losing almost half its value.
- The net worth of VinFast's owner, Pham Nhat Vuong, has also plunged as a result.
After a spectacular debut earlier this week, shares in VinFast have hit the skids.
After the first day of trading in New York, shares in the Vietnamese electric carmaker closed at $37, leaving it worth about $85 billion – far more than Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler Stellantis.
However, VinFast But has dropped sharply over the past two days, losing more than half its 255% gains on its Nasdaq Global Select Market debut.
The stock closed 33% lower at $20 on Thursday and was down another 8% in pre-market trading on Friday.
As a result, its billionaire founder and chairman Pham Nhat Vuong has seen his own net worth tumble.
He owns about 99 per cent of the company and the surge pushed his own personal fortune up eightfold on Tuesday, but it's since fallen about 40% to $26.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Vuong remains Vietnam's richest person, however.
VinFast is yet to make a profit and the first cars it shipped to the US came under fire.
"There have been some negative reviews," CEO Le Thi Thu Thuy told Bloomberg TV. "We take them very close to our heart, we reflect on the feedback from those reviews and we make our vehicles better."
VinFast delivered just 11,300 vehicles in the first half of this year, per a company presentation.
That's a fraction of its larger competitors such as Tesla and BYD that delivered 889,000 and 1.26 million vehicles respectively during the same period.