Vietnam does not usually come to mind when discussing global industrial powerhouses. Yet on the eastern outskirts of Hanoi, an empire has emerged that increasingly shapes how modern Vietnam lives, moves, studies, shops, and dreams.
VinFast, the new EV brand with a whole lineup of cars and its own electric buses, is now trying to expand further into Europe, and is only the visible tip of a much larger iceberg.
Invited by VinFast and traveling with a group of European journalists, we were immersed in what many Vietnamese simply call “the Vin ecosystem”. A vast network of companies and services through which millions of urban Vietnamese now interact daily with the country’s most powerful private group.
One of Asia’s most ambitious conglomerates
Over little more than two decades, Vingroup has grown from a real estate developer into one of Southeast Asia’s most ambitious conglomerates, spanning electric vehicles, buses, taxis, artificial intelligence, hospitals, schools, universities, shopping malls, luxury resorts, and giant, privately built cities.
The first impression these developments often create is one of overwhelming scale and theatrical ambition: a somewhat bombastic, neo-classical aesthetic in which the university building was inspired by the timeless grandeur of America’s Ivy League campuses, blending Beaux-Arts elegance and monumental gateways which evoke the Arc de Triomphe. Around it, artificial lagoons lined with palm trees and manicured beaches recall the extravagantly engineered landscapes of Abu Dhabi’s Palm Island.
The result can feel simultaneously futuristic and strangely synthetic — a vision of prosperity built at high speed, where global architectural symbols are reassembled into a distinctly Vietnamese version of aspirational modernity.
Vietnam’s richest ‘visionary’ man
In many ways, Vingroup resembles the history of giant family-controlled industrial groups that powered the rise of Japan and South Korea after the war — the keiretsu and chaebols such as Hyundai, Samsung, or Toyota — except that this version emerged inside a socialist one-party state.
At the center stands Vietnam’s richest man, Phạm Nhật Vượng, a deeply private billionaire whose rise mirrors Vietnam’s own transformation from post-war socialist austerity to turbocharged state-guided capitalism.
Employing over 100,000 people
It is difficult to overstate Vingroup’s scale today. Depending on how its sprawling structure is counted, Vingroup today encompasses dozens of subsidiaries and affiliated entities.
The group’s activities range from the EV maker VinFast to Green SM electric taxis, VinBus public transport, Vin Robotics, VinMetal, VinMed hospitals, VinEngero sustainable energy, the Vinschool education system, VinUniversity, VinPearl resorts, and Vinhomes real estate megaprojects. The list is sheer endless, with even a Nobel-lookalike international award for scientists, the VinFuture Prize.
Recent estimates suggest that the broader ecosystem employs well over 230,000 people worldwide, with the majority in Vietnam. And still growing. One could wonder when the country will be renamed Vin-Nam instead of Vietnam?
Governed by the Communist Party
The paradox is obvious. All this unfolds inside a country still governed by the Communist Party of Vietnam. Yet modern Vietnam long ago abandoned orthodox Soviet economics.
Since the Đổi Mới reforms of the late 1980s, the country has pursued what it officially calls a “socialist-oriented market economy”: a system in which the Party retains political monopoly while encouraging private capital to accelerate development.
Vingroup may be the clearest expression of that model. The unwritten deal appears straightforward: the state allows private giants to become extraordinarily wealthy and influential as long as they contribute to national modernization and remain politically aligned.
In return, companies like Vingroup build housing, infrastructure, technology, schools, jobs, and increasingly national prestige. Yet the vast urban developments associated with this model also raise a more complicated question: who can actually afford to live in these new cities?
Many of the apartments, villas, shopping districts, and resort-style neighborhoods target Vietnam’s growing upper-middle class, wealthy domestic investors, overseas Vietnamese, and speculative buyers rather than average urban workers.
For many Vietnamese, the monumental neo-classical architecture, palm-lined artificial beaches, and meticulously planned boulevards project an aspirational image of prosperity and global status, but one that can also feel socially distant — impressive to visit, yet economically out of reach.
The result is a striking contrast between the polished, almost cinematic environments of these privately built enclaves and the far more improvised urban reality experienced by much of the population outside their gates.
In chaotic Hanoi, for example, a city of roughly nine million inhabitants where nearly five million motorbikes weave through the streets each day, remaining the primary means of transportation for much of the population.
The Vietnam ‘dream’ story?
Phạm Nhật Vượng’s own biography fits almost perfectly into this modern Vietnamese narrative. Born in Hanoi in 1968, during wartime North Vietnam, he reportedly grew up in modest circumstances, with a father in the military and a mother selling tea or street food.
Like many talented Vietnamese students of his generation, he received a scholarship to study in the Soviet Union, attending the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute.
When the Soviet bloc collapsed, Vượng stayed in Ukraine rather than returning home. There, amid the economic chaos of the 1990s, he built a fortune selling instant noodles under the Mivina brand. Eventually acquired by Nestlé, the business provided the capital that seeded what would become Vingroup.
Back in Vietnam, Vượng moved first into luxury real estate, then into virtually every sector touching the emerging urban middle class. What we visited outside Hanoi resembles less a conventional property project than a privately built urban civilization.
Vinhomes Ocean Park stretches across hundreds of hectares east of the capital. Artificial lagoons, apartment towers, gated villas, schools, shopping areas, and parks form a carefully curated vision of modern Vietnamese life.
Nearby stands VinUniversity, an ultra-modern English-language campus developed in partnership with institutions including Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania. The message is unmistakable: Vietnam does not merely want to manufacture cheaply for the world anymore; it wants to create globally competitive brands, technology, and talent.
For many upwardly mobile Vietnamese families, the appeal is clear. Traditional Hanoi can mean congestion, pollution, cramped housing, and overstretched public infrastructure.
The Vingroup alternative offers order, greenery, security, private healthcare, modern education, and increasingly even mobility through VinFast vehicles, Green SM taxis, and VinBus electric public transport.
Critics, however, see something else emerging: privatized islands for the affluent, speculative real estate excess, and a blurring of the lines between state ambition and corporate power.
Some of these vast developments initially appeared eerily half-empty as investors snapped up apartments faster than residents moved in. Others argue that projects like Ocean Park feel detached from the chaotic vitality that defines “real Hanoi”.
Yet even critics acknowledge that Vingroup has reshaped Vietnam at astonishing speed. The company’s electric blue Green SM taxis already dominate parts of Hanoi’s streetscape, while VinBus has become a showcase for cleaner urban transport.
And looming over everything is the car brand VinFast itself, the most audacious gamble of all. In its homeland, already the top-selling (EV) brand, it’s Vietnam’s attempt to build a global EV champion capable of competing against Chinese, Japanese, and Korean giants.
That gamble — and the role electric buses may play in VinFast’s European ambitions, including at Busworld Europe in Belgium — will be the subject of the next parts of this trilogy.
