The unbelievable run for shares of Vietnamese electric-vehicle maker VinFast Auto continued Friday, making it the second-most valuable car stock on the planet, behind only Tesla.
It is also the most valuable EV start-up ever. Management might want to consider taking advantge of the high price.
While the world was watching Nvidia (ticker: NVDA) stock trade after its second-quarter earnings report, VinFast shares rose 32% Thursday, closing at $49. With about 2.3 billion shares outstanding, that gave the company a market capitalization of about $114 billion, more than Ford Motor (F), General Motors (GM), and Stellantis (STLA) combined.
Nvidia stock added roughly $5 billion in market value Thursday. VinFast added about $28 billion.
VinFast shares were up again, a lot, on Friday, jumping 40.4% to $68.77 a share. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite were up 0.7% and 0.9%, respectively. At over $68 a share, VinFast’s market capitalization is about $159 billion.
That makes shares worth more than any EV start-up, ever. Rivian Automotive (RIVN) was worth $153 billion at the prior high mark in November 2021. Rivian shares are worth about $19 billion now.
VinFast shares are also worth more than Porsche (P911. Germany), which is worth about $100 billion. It is comfortably ahead of the second-largest maker of battery-electric vehicles, or BEVs, on the planet, BYD (1211. Hong Kong), which is worth about $92 billion.
Only Tesla (TSLA), the largest producer of BEVs, is worth more. Tesla’s market cap is about $720 billion. Tesla passed $150 billion in market cap in early 2020, roughly 17 years after its founding and long after it had ceased to be a start-up. Tesla’s market cap was about $2 billion at the time of its 2010 IPO.
The deal VinFast management struck to bring the company public valued the stock at roughly $23 billion. Few saw the huge gains coming.
One thing a high stock price can do is provide the opportunity to raise capital. VinFast doesn’t produce free cash flow yet and will need more money from external sources to build its business. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about its plans for raising cash.
One problem with raising capital with a rapidly rising stock is that it can be a catalyst for the price to fall. If VinFast was to raise $1 billion by selling roughly 20 million shares, it would have to place those 20 million shares with investors. That would be significant because only about 17 million shares are available for trading following the merger with a special-purpose acquisition company that brought VinFast public. Most are held by insiders.
That 17 million figure is one reason shares are up so much. Less than $1 billion worth of stock is actively bought and sold. That is small enough to be influenced by traders.
There is lots of action. More than 40 million shares have traded over the past three sessions. That puts the average holding period for a trader, or investor, in the stock at about 1.3 days.
Short sellers are one kind of trader. They borrow stock they don’t own and sell it, betting on price declines. Early short sellers haven’t made out well.
S3 Partners managing partner Ihor Dusaniwsky told Barron’s there were roughly 1.2 million shares sold short just after the SPAC merger closed. Those short sellers are down in the range of $20 million. That number, however, is only an abstraction. The traders could have bought and sold stock many times since then.
Shorts, it seems, have run for the hills. Dusaniwsky told Barron’s Friday that there are only about 100,000 shares short now. If traders were trying to force a short squeeze, it has already happened.
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