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In a piece on Monday, Alphaville contributor Craig Coben warned about VinFast, the Vietnamese car-maker that floated via SPAC last week. He wrote:
The press articles all mention that the chair controls 99 per cent of newly listed VinFast. But that’s not just an aside: it is the story. This is no conventional de-Spac; rather it resembles a backdoor listing into an empty listed shell. And the stock price is just an arbitrary number on a screen, not the market’s judgment of the company’s worth…
VinFast has less than one per cent free float, and trading volumes are low and falling. A stock market listing should provide price discovery and liquidity; VinFast shares have neither.
How’s it been doing since? Well, uh:
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FTAV is as excited about this well-functioning market as anyone, so we propose a little game: the Alphaville reader who can best guess VinFast’s closing market capitalisation for today (Wednesday) will win a free T-shirt from our swag shop.
To enter, simply email your name and guess to [email protected] before US markets open (2:30pm UK time/9:30am EST) today.
We’ll let you know the winner after US markets close tonight.
UPDATE — CLOSED FOR ENTRIES: Time’s up. We’ve had a slew of guesses, with a mean average of about $60bn and a modal average of $69.420bn. Let’s let capitalism do its thing…
UPDATE 2 — IT’S QUIET… TOO QUIET:
Further reading
— Beware, a 2023 Spac oddity