Good morning! Hello to new readers, and welcome to the latest edition of the Vietnam Weekly, written by Ho Chi Minh City-based reporter Mike Tatarski.
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It’s been a little while since I ran a poll, so here’s a new one:
On to the news.
Another Day, Another Delay
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: HCMC’s long-delayed first metro line will be delayed again.
I haven’t seen this reported in English yet, but last week Yamada Takio, Japan’s ambassador to Vietnam, sent a note to the municipal People’s Committee commenting on the timeline for key remaining work.
Over the weekend the Ho Chi Minh City Urban Railway Management Board, which oversees the project, announced that staff training and route testing won’t be completed until October, significantly later than the once-planned July.
After that, the line still needs to be accepted by the city and handed over. Theoretically, this means the current timeline of opening sometime in Q4 is still in play - thankfully the absurd ‘soft opening’ idea seems to have been dropped.
However, I recently met someone working on this and they said the situation is far worse than what is being publicly reported while estimating that it won’t open until the second half of 2025 (not a typo).
This is largely a personnel and red tape issue at this stage, as the physical infrastructure of the route is nearly finished: the huge train depot is more or less ready, trains are constantly being tested, the signature underground Ben Thanh Station looks great, and the pedestrian footbridges to above-ground stations are well on the way.
All of this can be true, yet we could still be a year away from commercial operation.
Blocks and Bans
Earlier this month Steam, the world’s largest digital distributor of computer games, was blocked in Vietnam and its online store stopped accepting payments from Vietnam.
I’m not much of a gamer, but I bought Rollercoaster Tycoon through Steam to kill time during the pandemic - I can still load the game, but when I try to access the store I get a message saying ‘Unable to connect to server.’
Vietnam’s Reddit community was livid over this development, though a VPN generally functions as a workaround.
There hasn’t been an official announcement on this from either Steam or the Vietnamese side, though VietnamNet published a story (in Vietnamese) including a quote from a domestic game company representative complaining that Steam can release games here without obtaining official approval.
It’s also possible that tax issues are at play: Vietnam is trying to crack down on foreign companies that distribute digital products without paying local taxes since they don’t have a physical presence in the country.
This isn’t the first example of such a move, with average Vietnamese ultimately paying the price by losing access.
Last weekend, Netflix removed about 90 games from its app in Vietnam and deleted the ‘Mobile Games’ section. This came after the Ministry of Information and Communications ordered the streaming giant to stop distributing unauthorized games in early April.
And last October, Amazon Prime Video exited Vietnam with no explanation, though the move was surely related to similar issues.
Netflix has also pulled all reality TV shows and stand-up comedy specials from its Vietnam service due to regulatory issues - this includes anything adjacent to stand-up, as I learned when I tried to watch John Mulaney’s delightfully weird Everybody’s in L.A. series.
It’s clear that Vietnam is too small of a market for these companies to even bother with complying with tax regulations. (On a TV note - is anyone watching The Sympathizer? That, of course, is not being discussed here at all.)
Meanwhile, the censoring of new movies is alive and well after 2023’s high-profile Barbie ban: Challengers and The Fall Guy, two big recent Hollywood releases, were both pulled here days before their scheduled debut for no known reason.
VinFast’s Wild Week
Wow, what a stretch.
Last week the carmaker began accepting pre-orders for its VF 3 mini EV, flooding nearly every sales channel known to man and pushing social media hard by inviting influencers to the Hai Phong factory.
You could even reserve a VF 3 on Shopee, Vietnam’s most popular e-commerce platform.
This full-court press resulted in some strange material, including this article about a young woman who supposedly went six years without buying anything more expensive than VND2 million (other than her phone and computer) before putting down VND15 million (US$589) for a VF 3. The car’s full price is around VND350 million (US$13,742).
The company also announced that it received a record-breaking (which record is unclear) 27,649 non-refundable, non-transferable pre-orders in 66 hours - I’m also not sure what the significance of that amount of time is.
VinFast’s Indonesia team, meanwhile, announced that they had selected a location for a factory there, without saying where.
Over in the United States, however, the situation is grim.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation into the VF 8 crash that killed a family of four in California a month ago.
On Monday, the U.S. International Trade Commission announced it is investigating a complaint from ArcelorMittal, the second-largest steel producer in the world, that VinFast violated patents on high-strength aluminum and aluminum alloy-coated steel.
According to Reuters, ArcelorMittal bought a VF 8 last year to test its materials and warned VinFast back in November 2022 that it may be violating patents.
VinFast, meanwhile, responded by saying they sourced the aluminum and steel from an unnamed supplier that “assured us that they have not infringed upon any third-party intellectual property rights."
Finally, a real estate services company in San Francisco sued VinFast for allegedly not paying rent for space in a shopping center, with the total unpaid rent adding up to US$356,000.
Hồ Ngọc Lâm, head of Vingroup’s legal department and deputy general director of legal affairs at VinFast, responded in state media by largely dismissing these cases as part of American litigation culture.
There may be some element of truth there, but this is an alarming number of potential legal issues - including a fatal crash - without including the various class-action law firms seeking investors who lost money on VinFast’s post-IPO stock movement. (VFS is up almost 80% - to US$4.67/share - over the last month for no obvious reason.)
Extra Links:
Saving the Mekong: The arduous battle to sustain life along South-east Asia’s longest river (The Straits Times)
Vietnamese durian farmers face thorny issues that could threaten growing demand from China (Channel News Asia)
'Longings' Brings 22 Stories by Vietnamese Female Writers to the World (Saigoneer)
Delayed project traps 1,000 families in slum along HCMC's metro line (VnExpress International)
Have a great weekend!
Interesting
"Unpaid rent on a space in a mall in San Francisco..." Like every other business that has fled the city.