VNG Corp. has filed an initial public offering on the Nasdaq Global Select Market, a week after the blockbuster market debut of electric vehicle maker VinFast on the New York bourse.
VNG, which is based in Ho Chi Minh City, said in a regulatory filing that it plans to sell about 22 million shares in the IPO, the size and price of which have yet to be determined. The company is one of Vietnam’s four unicorns, according to Venture Cap Insights.
VNG was founded in 2004 by Vietnamese entrepreneurs Le Hong Minh and Vuong Quang Khai. The company—which counts Chinese tech giant Tencent as its largest investor—has since grown to become the largest publisher of mobile games in Vietnam. It also operates messaging app, Zalo, which has 75 million monthly active users (MAUs) and music streaming platform Zing MP3, which has 28 million MAUs.
Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, UBS and BofA Securities will act as underwriters of the IPO. Besides Tencent, other shareholders of VNG include Facebook billionaire Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital, South Korea’s Mirae Assets as well as Singapore’s state-linked investment firms GIC and Temasek.
The IPO comes on the heels of last week’s listing of VinFast, whose market cap skyrocketed to about $86 billion, more than triple the initial $23 billion valuation of the company after it merged with Black Spade Acquisition Co., a SPAC backed by casino mogul Lawrence Ho.
While the rally boosted the net worth of VinFast’s controlling shareholder Pham Nhat Vuong—Vietnam’s wealthiest person—nearly five times to $32.3 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time data, the stock price has been extremely volatile given its small free float. Pham controls 99% of VinFast’s shares through his flagship company, Vingroup, and his privately held investment firms.
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