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The 2023 VinFast VF 9.
Courtesy of VinFast
Investors still have an appetite for EV start-ups backed by special-purpose acquisition companies. Just look at the amazing debut of VinFast.
The Vietnamese electric- vehicle maker is beginning life on Tuesday as a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq stock exchange after closing its merger with the SPAC
Black Spade Acquisition
(ticker: BSAQ).
With the deal closing, Black Spade essentially becomes VinFast. The stock symbol changes to “VFS” from “BSAQ.”
Investors appeared euphoric after shareholders approved the merger on Thursday. Black Spade shares rose 73% to $18.50 apiece, but fell 43% to $10.45 coming into Tuesday trading.
And they should brace for more volatility. Shares opened Tuesday at about $22 apiece, traded as low as $16 and were at almost $28 a share around noon. The
S&P 500
and
Nasdaq Composite
were down 0.8% and 0.7%, respectively.
The VinFast-Black Spade merger was a deal investors were enthusiastic about. It valued VinFast stock at roughly $23 billion, more than the market capitalization of
Rivian Automotive
(RIVN),
Lucid Group
(LCID), or
Polestar Automotive
(PSNY). All three of those EV start-ups have some traction with investors.
At $18.50 a share, Thursday’s closing price, VinFast was valued at about $43 billion, just short of
General Motors
‘ (GM) market capitalization of about $46 billion.
At $28 a share, VinFast has a market cap of more than $64 billion. That is more than
Ford Motor
(F), GM, and many other automakers. It is also worth more than Rivian, Lucid, and Polestar combined.
All the wild trading should remind investors of what things were like at the start of the SPAC boom.
Nikola
(NKLA) shares doubled on June 8, 2020, just days after its SPAC merger closed. Shares hit $79.73 a day later. They closed at $2.50 on Monday. It has been far harder for companies to build EV businesses than investors initially imagined.
VinFast, though, already has significant sales and manufacturing capacity, two things that investors have used to differentiate EV start-ups. The company delivered 3,800 EVs in April, the most recent month for which data are available. It is also selling EVs in the U.S. Americans bought 740 VinFast VF8 SUVs in the second quarter.
VinFast CEO Thuy Le told Barron’s that coming to the U.S. early in the company’s journey was important, even though U.S. testing standards can be a little different than those in Europe and China.
“We are all about entrepreneurial spirit, innovative, determined, always ready to challenge the status quo. That’s who we are,” Le said. “That resonates very well with the American consciousness.”
VinFast has the capacity to build about 300,000 EVs a year. It has also broken ground on a $2 billion plant in North Carolina that has a planned initial capacity of 150,000 vehicles a year.
VinFast’s 2023 sales should range from $1.8 billion to $2 billion. Rivian, Lucid, and Polestar sales are projected to come in at $4.3 billion, $800 million, and $3.1 billion, respectively.
Now that VinFast is U.S.-listed, investors can look forward to analysts covering the stock and issuing estimates about sales and earnings, and they are expecting favorable projections. With a market cap of roughly $50 billion, VinFast is one of the most-valuable EV franchises on the planet. It is one of the most valuable automakers, too.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com