PLAN V

How Vietnamese BEV specialist VinFast is aiming to replicate its success outside its mother country

- By Kap Maceda Aguila

AMID AN embarrassment of automotive riches in the Philippines — more than 50 brands of which about half are accounted for by Chinese marques alone — VinFast is working quite hard to get customers to look its way.

Aside from being widely seen to be a friendly neighbor, dealing with Vietnam also allows Philippine customers to benefit from the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) agreement. This trade bloc pact, forged in 1992, effectively creates a single market by removing tariffs and other barriers to trade and investment among member states toward lowering cost.

While having a competitive advantage in this regard, VinFast was, admittedly, off to a rather shaky start in the Philippines. Yes, it had made a splash owing to well-designed battery electric vehicles, but there was also a view that it wasn't adequately ready to compete in our market just yet — whether as a result of past executives' unfamiliarity with the market's inner workings or just simply misfortune with some products. I leave it to those with a more direct interaction with the brand — at least through the latter — to make their conclusions. I did ask an owner of the VF 3, the marque's entry-level model, for an honest assessment of this vehicle. He is happy with it and, despite some minor hiccups, swears by his car's reliability.

And personally, I have driven VinFast vehicles without issue, at least for the short instances I was behind the wheel during a trip in Ho Chi Minh in the middle of the year, and just recently for a media/content creator trip to Hanoi — where VinFast officials also took us on what can be described as a short tour of the Vingroup kingdom where it belongs to.