Earlier this week, VinFast completed its merger with special-purpose acquisition company Black Spade Acquisition, allowing shares to be publicly traded. Between Monday and Tuesday, its stock price jumped to $37.06, an increase of more than 270 percent over the IPO price. That gave VinFast a market cap of more than $85 billion, making it more valuable than BMW, Ford and General Motors.
According to Automotive News, though, investors don’t seem to actually believe that VinFast is truly one of the most valuable automakers in the world. The stock price reportedly dropped 19 percent on Wednesday, and by mid-day today, it had dropped another 19.6 percent. At the time of writing, VinFast is currently trading at $20.48 a share and appears to slowly be dropping even further.
Could it be because the Vietnamese automaker has barely sold any cars in the U.S.? Or because the car it sells here, the VF8, has been met with near-universally terrible reviews? Or because it’s generally not a great sign when a company’s executives keep quitting? The world may never know. But for some unknown reason, it’s clear that investors have quickly lost faith in the idea that VinFast should be nearly as valuable as China’s BYD.
In all seriousness, though, it was highly unlikely that VinFast’s absurd market cap was going to last long. It can be exciting for investors to make a few bucks trading a new stock as its value climbs, but we can’t imagine many of them saw VinFast as an actual investment. They weren’t going to hold the stock long-term. They just wanted to see if they could make some money before the floor dropped out.
And as we reach the end of VinFast’s first week of trading, the excitement is probably over. We’re not exactly predicting a looming bankruptcy anytime soon, but at least Tesla has spent years building up hype over innovative new technology to encourage a market cap that’s so divorced from reality. Until VinFast can actually sell some cars, we expect to see its stock struggle to make any sort of meaningful comeback.