CtrlK
Vingroup Joint Stock Company (Vietnamese: Tập đoàn Vingroup) is the largest private conglomerate in Vietnam, headquartered in Hanoi. Founded in 1993 by Pham Nhat Vuong as Technocom, an instant noodle maker in Ukraine, the company returned to Vietnam in the early 2000s and reorganized as Vingroup in 2012 after merging its real estate arm Vincom with its hospitality arm Vinpearl. Today the group spans real estate (Vinhomes, Vincom Retail, Vinpearl), automotive (VinFast), technology (VinAI, VinBigData), healthcare (Vinmec), and education (VinUniversity, Vinschool). Vingroup trades on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange under the ticker VIC, while its automotive subsidiary VinFast trades on NASDAQ under the ticker VFS following an August 2023 merger with Black Spade Acquisition Co.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Type | Public (Joint Stock Company) |
| Founded | August 8, 1993 (as Technocom, Kharkiv, Ukraine) |
| Restructured | January 2012 (Vincom and Vinpearl merger) |
| Founder | Pham Nhat Vuong (Phạm Nhật Vượng) |
| Headquarters | No. 7, Bang Lang 1 Street, Vinhomes Riverside, Long Bien District, Hanoi, Vietnam |
| Chairman | Pham Nhat Vuong |
| CEO | Nguyen Viet Quang |
| Industries | Real estate, automotive, technology, healthcare, education, hospitality |
| Major subsidiaries | Vinhomes, Vincom Retail, Vinpearl, VinFast, VinAI (acquired by Qualcomm 2025), VinBigData, Vinmec, Vinschool, VinUniversity, GSM (Green and Smart Mobility) |
| Listing | HOSE: VIC (Vingroup); NASDAQ: VFS (VinFast subsidiary) |
| Listed (HOSE) | September 19, 2007 (as Vincom); renamed VIC in 2012 |
| Listed (NASDAQ) | August 15, 2023 (VinFast) |
| Employees | Approximately 50,000+ across the group |
| Website | vingroup.net |
The company that became Vingroup began on August 8, 1993, when Pham Nhat Vuong founded Technocom in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Vuong, who had moved to the Soviet Union in 1987 to study geological engineering at the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute, settled in Ukraine after graduating in 1993. He started a Vietnamese restaurant before turning to packaged food manufacturing. Technocom produced dehydrated foods, with its instant noodle brand Mivina becoming the dominant player in the Ukrainian market. By the late 1990s, Mivina had expanded into other dried foods and became a household name across post-Soviet markets.
In 2010, Vuong sold Technocom to Nestlé for a price reported at around $150 million. The sale gave him the capital to redirect his businesses toward Vietnam, where he had been quietly building real estate and hospitality projects since the early 2000s.
Vuong began investing in Vietnam around 2000. In 2001 he opened the first Vinpearl resort on Hon Tre Island near Nha Trang, marking the start of the group's hospitality arm. The following year he founded Vincom Joint Stock Company to develop commercial real estate, with Vincom Center Ba Trieu in Hanoi opening in 2004 as the first integrated trade complex in the country. Vincom expanded across Vietnam's major cities, while Vinpearl grew its resort and theme park footprint, including the Vinpearl Cable Car between Nha Trang and Hon Tre Island.
Vincom listed on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HOSE) in September 2007 under the ticker VIC. Vinpearl was listed separately on HOSE in 2008.
In December 2011, Vincom and Vinpearl signed a merger agreement that combined the two companies under Vincom's listed entity. The combined company changed its name to Vingroup Joint Stock Company in early 2012, retaining the VIC ticker. The merger created Vietnam's largest listed property group by market capitalization. Over the next several years Vingroup launched or restructured a series of brand subsidiaries: Vinhomes for residential housing, Vincom Retail for shopping malls, Vinmec for hospitals, Vinschool for K to 12 education, and VinEco for agriculture.
In June 2017, Vingroup founded VinFast, a wholly owned subsidiary, to manufacture cars and motorbikes. The company broke ground on a vehicle plant in Hai Phong's Cat Hai island the same year, completing the facility in 21 months. VinFast's first internal combustion vehicles, the LUX A2.0 sedan and LUX SA2.0 SUV (designed in collaboration with Pininfarina and built on BMW-licensed platforms), launched in mid-2019.
In parallel, Vingroup launched VinSmart in 2018 to build smartphones and consumer electronics under the Vsmart brand. VinSmart released 19 phone models and 5 television models before Vingroup announced on May 9, 2021 that it was shutting down the smartphone and TV business to redirect resources to electric vehicles.
In December 2019, Vingroup transferred its retail subsidiary VinCommerce (operator of the VinMart and VinMart+ chains) and its agriculture arm VinEco to Masan Group in a share swap deal. Masan later rebranded the stores as WinMart and WinMart+ in 2022. Vingroup explained the divestment as a move to concentrate resources on industry, technology, and trade, especially VinFast.
In May 2019, SK Group of South Korea acquired a 6.1% stake in Vingroup for about $1 billion, becoming a strategic shareholder. Vingroup also exited civil aviation when it cancelled its planned Vinpearl Air carrier in early 2020 before launch.
In early 2022, VinFast announced it would stop producing internal combustion vehicles and become a pure electric vehicle manufacturer, the first major automaker to make such a pivot from launch. On March 29, 2022, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper announced that VinFast had selected the Triangle Innovation Point megasite in Chatham County, North Carolina as the location for its first North American assembly plant, with planned investment of up to $4 billion across phases.
On August 14, 2023, VinFast Auto Ltd. completed a business combination with Black Spade Acquisition Co., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) backed by Hong Kong-based Lawrence Ho. The combined entity began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on August 15, 2023 under the tickers VFS (ordinary shares) and VFSWW (warrants). VinFast opened at $22 and closed its first trading day at $37.06, briefly giving it a market capitalization above $85 billion that put it ahead of Ford and General Motors. The shares quickly retraced as Vingroup's holding meant the public float was tiny.
In April 2024, Pham Nhat Vuong publicly committed at least an additional $1 billion of his personal wealth to VinFast as the carmaker continued to burn cash. On November 12, 2024, Vingroup announced a multi-pronged financial support package: a loan of up to 35 trillion Vietnamese dong (about $1.4 billion) to VinFast through the end of 2026, the conversion of about 80 trillion dong (around $3.3 billion) of existing intercompany loans into preferred shares, and a separate personal sponsorship from Vuong of 50 trillion dong (about $2.1 billion) to VinFast Vietnam. The stated aim was to give VinFast enough runway to reach cash flow break-even by the end of 2026.
In April 2025, Qualcomm acquired the generative AI division of VinAI for an undisclosed sum, with VinAI founder Hung Bui joining Qualcomm as Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm AI Research. The acquisition included VinAI's GenAI engineers and research output, while VinAI's automotive AI and other product lines remained with Vingroup.
Vingroup organizes its operations into three broad pillars: Technology and Industry, Trade and Services, and Social Enterprises. The table below summarizes the major operating subsidiaries.
| Subsidiary | Sector | Founded | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vinhomes | Residential real estate | 2008 (rebranded 2014) | Largest residential developer in Vietnam; HOSE: VHM |
| Vincom Retail | Commercial real estate | 2012 | Operates Vincom Center, Vincom Mega Mall, Vincom Plaza, Vincom+ chains; HOSE: VRE |
| Vinpearl | Hospitality and resorts | 2001 | Operates resorts, hotels, golf courses, and VinWonders amusement parks |
| VinFast | Automotive (EVs and motorbikes) | June 2017 | Pivoted to EV-only in 2022; NASDAQ: VFS |
| VinAI | AI research and products | 2019 | Generative AI division acquired by Qualcomm in April 2025 |
| VinBigData | Big data, language models, medical AI | 2018 | Developed ViGPT Vietnamese language model and VinDr medical imaging |
| Vinmec | Healthcare | 2012 | International hospital network; not-for-profit positioning |
| Vinschool | K to 12 education | 2013 | Operates dozens of campuses across Vietnam |
| VinUniversity | Higher education | 2018 (operating from 2020) | Founded with Cornell and University of Pennsylvania support |
| GSM (Green and Smart Mobility) | Electric taxi and rental | March 2023 | Operates Xanh SM (Green SM) electric taxi service in Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, the Philippines |
| VinBus | Electric public transit | 2019 | Operates electric bus fleets in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Phu Quoc |
| VinSmart | Consumer electronics | 2018 | Discontinued May 2021 |
| VinCommerce | Grocery retail | 2014 | Sold to Masan Group, December 2019 |
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1993 | Pham Nhat Vuong founds Technocom in Kharkiv, Ukraine |
| 2001 | Opens first Vinpearl resort on Hon Tre Island, Nha Trang |
| 2002 | Founds Vincom Joint Stock Company |
| 2007 | Vincom lists on HOSE under ticker VIC |
| 2010 | Sells Technocom (Mivina) to Nestlé |
| 2012 | Vincom and Vinpearl merge to form Vingroup |
| 2017 | Founds VinFast |
| 2018 | Launches VinSmart; founds Vinhomes IPO process; signs Cornell and Penn deal for VinUniversity |
| 2019 | First VinFast vehicles delivered; founds VinAI; SK Group buys 6.1% stake; sells VinCommerce to Masan |
| 2020 | VinUniversity enrolls inaugural class |
| 2021 | Discontinues VinSmart smartphones and TVs |
| 2022 | VinFast announces full transition to EV-only; selects North Carolina for US plant |
| 2023 | Launches GSM electric taxi service (April); VinFast lists on Nasdaq via SPAC merger (August 15) |
| 2024 | Vuong pledges $2.1 billion personal sponsorship to VinFast (December) |
| 2025 | Qualcomm acquires VinAI generative AI division (April) |
VinFast Auto Ltd. is Vingroup's automotive subsidiary and the dominant share of the group's industrial bet. Founded in June 2017 by Vingroup, the company built its first plant on a 335-hectare site on Cat Hai island near Hai Phong port. The factory was constructed in 21 months and includes stamping, body shop, paint, assembly, and (originally) engine production. Stated rated capacity is up to 950,000 vehicles per year by 2026 across multiple production lines.
VinFast's first generation of vehicles consisted of internal combustion sedans and SUVs. The LUX A2.0 sedan and LUX SA2.0 SUV launched in mid-2019, designed by Pininfarina on a BMW-licensed platform, and the smaller Fadil hatchback (a rebadged Opel Karl Rocks) followed. In early 2022 the company stopped accepting orders for combustion vehicles and committed to an all-electric lineup. The current EV range includes the VF 3 mini SUV, VF 5 small SUV, VF 6, VF 7, VF 8, VF 9 (a seven-seat full-size SUV), and a range of electric scooters.
The company entered the United States market in 2023, opening showrooms in California and beginning deliveries of the VF 8. North Carolina assembly plant construction began in summer 2023 at the Triangle Innovation Point megasite in Chatham County. In 2024, VinFast paused construction citing economic conditions and pushed first US production back to 2028.
VinFast's Nasdaq debut on August 15, 2023 followed completion of the SPAC merger with Black Spade Acquisition Co. one day earlier. The deal had been valued at about $23 billion in the original announcement. Trading was extremely thin in the first weeks because Vingroup retained nearly all the shares. The stock has lost a substantial share of its initial value since the listing as VinFast continued to report large operating losses through 2024 and 2025. In Q4 2025, VinFast reported quarterly revenue of about $1.6 billion on roughly 86,557 deliveries.
VinAI Research was founded in 2019 in Hanoi as Vingroup's flagship AI laboratory. Its founder and CEO, Bui Hai Hung (Hung Hai Bui), is a Vietnamese computer scientist who had previously worked at Google DeepMind, Adobe Research, Nuance Communications, and the SRI Artificial Intelligence Center. Under Bui, VinAI built a research portfolio that placed it among the more visible AI industrial labs in Southeast Asia, with papers accepted at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ECCV, EMNLP, and ACL.
VinAI's two best-known open-source releases for the Vietnamese NLP community are PhoBERT and PhoGPT. PhoBERT, published in 2020 (EMNLP Findings), was the first large-scale monolingual pre-trained language model for Vietnamese, in base and large sizes, trained on a 20 GB Vietnamese corpus and reaching state of the art on a range of Vietnamese NLP benchmarks. PhoGPT, released in late 2023, is a 4 billion parameter generative model series pre-trained from scratch on roughly 102 billion Vietnamese tokens, with both base and chat variants distributed on Hugging Face.
Beyond language, VinAI built computer vision systems for driver monitoring, advanced driver assistance, and parking, several of which were integrated into VinFast vehicles. The company also developed face recognition and other applied vision products.
In April 2025, Qualcomm announced that it would acquire VinAI's generative AI team. Hung Bui joined Qualcomm AI Research as Vice President of Technology after the close. The remaining VinAI businesses, particularly automotive AI, stayed with Vingroup.
VinBigData, founded in 2018 as Vingroup Big Data Institute, runs the group's other major AI line. It built ViGPT, a Vietnamese large language model released in 2023 in three sizes (1.6 billion, 7 billion, and 13 billion parameters), and the VinDr family of medical imaging products for radiology screening. VinDr Lab, an open-source data labeling platform for medical AI, was released in 2021. VinBigData has also organized public data competitions, including a chest X-ray abnormality detection challenge on Kaggle.
Other technology units include VinCSS (cybersecurity, including FIDO2 authentication), VinHMS (hotel management software), VinTech (R and D services), and VinID (consumer fintech and loyalty).
Vingroup's largest revenue contributor is its real estate complex, anchored by Vinhomes. Vinhomes develops master-planned residential townships, branded apartment complexes, and villa estates across Vietnam. The company is listed on HOSE under VHM and is the country's largest residential developer. Vinhomes' major projects include Vinhomes Royal City and Vinhomes Times City in Hanoi, Vinhomes Central Park in Ho Chi Minh City, Vinhomes Smart City, Vinhomes Ocean Park, Vinhomes Grand Park, and Vinhomes Vu Yen.
Vincom Retail (HOSE: VRE) operates the Vincom-branded retail real estate portfolio. The portfolio includes the Vincom Center luxury format, Vincom Mega Mall, Vincom Plaza, Vincom+, and various shophouse formats across Vietnam.
Vinpearl runs Vingroup's hotel, resort, and amusement park network. The brand began with the original Vinpearl Resort and Cable Car in Nha Trang and has grown to include resorts in Phu Quoc, Da Nang, Nha Trang, Ha Long, and other Vietnamese tourist destinations. Vinpearl operates VinWonders amusement parks (Nha Trang, Phu Quoc, Nam Hoi An), the Vinpearl Safari wildlife park on Phu Quoc, and golf courses under the Vinpearl Golf brand.
Vingroup positions its education and healthcare arms as not-for-profit social enterprises within the group, with profits reinvested in their respective systems rather than distributed to other Vingroup businesses.
Vinmec runs Vietnam's largest private international hospital network. The flagship Vinmec International Hospital opened at the Times City complex in Hanoi in 2012. The system includes general hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City, Hai Phong, Phu Quoc, Nha Trang, Da Nang, Ha Long, and other locations, plus Vinmec Royal City international clinic and the Vinmec Healthcare System Research Institute.
Vinschool, founded in 2013, operates a K to 12 private school network across Vietnam with dozens of campuses. It uses a curriculum blending Vietnamese national requirements with English-language and Cambridge International tracks.
VinUniversity (VinUni) was approved by the Vietnamese Prime Minister in March 2018 and built on a campus in Gia Lam, Hanoi, with construction starting that year. Vingroup signed strategic collaboration agreements with Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 to support the new institution. Cornell led consultative collaboration on the College of Business and the College of Engineering and Computer Science; Penn supported the College of Health Sciences. The first class of around 300 students enrolled in the academic year 2020 to 2021. The university is designed for an eventual capacity of about 3,500 students.
Pham Nhat Vuong (Phạm Nhật Vượng), born August 5, 1968 in Hanoi, is the founder, chairman, and largest shareholder of Vingroup. He grew up in modest circumstances in northern Vietnam, won a place at the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute in 1987, and graduated in 1993. After settling in Kharkiv, Ukraine, he started a Vietnamese restaurant before founding Technocom and the Mivina noodle business. He returned to Vietnam in the early 2000s, sold Technocom to Nestlé in 2010, and used the proceeds to scale up Vincom and Vinpearl.
Vuong is consistently ranked the richest person in Vietnam and one of the wealthiest in Southeast Asia. Forbes' real-time billionaire tracker placed his net worth at over $30 billion through much of 2026, briefly surpassing Xiaomi's Lei Jun and ranking him in the global top 100 of richest individuals. Most of his wealth is tied up in Vingroup and VinFast equity, so it tracks the share prices of those two listed entities closely.
In 2021 Vuong took over as CEO of VinFast, putting his personal capital and reputation behind the EV bet. Through 2024 and 2025 he made a series of personal financial commitments to VinFast, including the December 2024 pledge of 50 trillion dong (about $2.1 billion) in personal sponsorship.
Vingroup's listed parent (HOSE: VIC) is one of the largest companies on the Vietnamese stock market by market capitalization. Group revenue for 2022 was reported at about VND 101.8 trillion (approximately $4 billion at the time), with consolidated employee count around 51,000. VinFast's losses, which Vingroup books as parent, have been the dominant driver of consolidated profitability swings since 2019. VinFast itself reported revenue of approximately VND 90.4 trillion in 2025 (a 105 percent year over year jump) on record deliveries, while losses widened in absolute terms.
Vingroup's group structure means several of its subsidiaries trade independently on HOSE: Vinhomes (VHM), Vincom Retail (VRE), and Vinpearl. VinFast trades on Nasdaq (VFS). The 2019 SK Group investment of about $1 billion for a 6.1 percent stake remains one of the largest foreign strategic investments in a Vietnamese conglomerate.
VinFast's cash burn has been the central financial story for the wider group. After the August 2023 Nasdaq listing, the company continued to spend heavily on capacity expansion, dealer network buildout in the United States and Europe, and aggressive expansion into India and Indonesia. To stabilize the situation, Vingroup and Vuong personally committed billions of dollars in 2024 to support VinFast through 2026, by which point the company is targeted to reach cash flow break-even.
GSM, founded in March 2023, has scaled rapidly. Its Xanh SM (Green SM) brand operates electric taxi services across Vietnamese provinces and has expanded into Laos (October 2023), Indonesia, and the Philippines. Reports in late 2025 indicated that GSM is preparing for a Hong Kong IPO in 2026 or 2027.
In April 2025, Qualcomm's acquisition of VinAI's generative AI division marked a significant divestment from the AI portfolio, although VinBigData remains within the group and other VinAI lines (notably automotive AI) continue to operate.