I ENDED my column last week with: “And then VinGroup happened.”
VinGroup is the largest private conglomerate in Vietnam and the most visible symbol of what the country has decided to become. It was founded by Pham Nhat Vuong, who started his business career in the 1990s selling instant noodles in Ukraine.
Let that sink in for a moment. A young Vietnamese man in post-Soviet Ukraine, selling noodles, would eventually build the company that would help reshape Vietnam’s cities, health care system, education sector, and automotive industry.
Vuong returned to Vietnam and built VinGroup into an ecosystem that touches nearly every layer of daily life. Through Vinhomes and Vinpearl, the company transformed land into smart cities, luxury resorts, and high-end residential developments that gave Vietnam’s emerging middle class a new standard of living. Through Vincom Retail, it modernized commercial infrastructure. Through Vinmec, it built international-standard hospitals. Through VinSchool and VinUniversity, it began developing the high-skilled, tech-literate workforce that a knowledge economy requires.
But the most consequential move was VinFast.
In less than two years, VinGroup built a fully automated, state-of-the-art automotive manufacturing complex in Hai Phong. A country whose people once fled by boat and whose economy once struggled to feed itself had entered the world of heavy manufacturing and automotive production.
VinFast initially produced re-engineered BMW-based vehicles before pivoting entirely to electric mobility in 2022. Today, it builds electric SUVs, e-scooters, and buses. It has launched operations in North America and Europe. VinGroup also established GSM, a nationwide electric taxi and mobility service that has put millions of Vietnamese consumers into electric vehicles (EVs) and accelerated the country’s transition to sustainable transportation almost overnight.
None of this has been without risk.
VinFast has burned through capital at a staggering rate. The conglomerate funds much of its industrial ambition through profits generated by its real estate division, a financial structure that analysts continue to watch closely. The debt is real, and the global EV market is brutally competitive.
But VinGroup’s bet is Vietnam’s bet: that the country can transform itself from a low-cost manufacturing platform into a high-tech global competitor within a single generation. And it is building the infrastructure — both physical and institutional — to make that happen.
The VinFuture Prize, a global science and technology award funded by Vuong and his wife, now draws some of the world’s top researchers to Hanoi every year.
Vietnam now hosts a global science prize. The grandchildren of the boat people will grow up in a country that competes with the world’s best minds.
Now, where is the Philippines in all of this?
Vietnamese farmers once came to the Philippines to learn rice cultivation. Today, they export rice to us.
Vietnamese workers trained in our semiconductor firms in Baguio and Northern Luzon. Today, they manufacture their own chips, appliances, and computers.
They came to study production processes in our apparel factories. Today, they sell shoes and clothing to us.
Even Philippine automotive plants — GM, Ford, and Isuzu — served as training grounds for Vietnamese and Thai engineers and technicians in the late 1990s.
Today, they have VinFast.
What didn’t we do?
That question is not an accusation. It is the most honest question I can ask about the country I love.
We had the head start. We had the relationships. We had institutions, however imperfect. We had English, a democratic tradition, and a globally dispersed diaspora sending money home.
We had nearly everything that should have made the next chapter easier.
And yet here we are, watching a country that once arrived on our shores with very little.
The same people we once housed, fed, and taught have raced past us in automotive manufacturing, electronics, agriculture, and urban development, while we are still arguing about right-of-way issues for infrastructure projects and paying some of the highest electricity rates in Asia.
The Philippines is not a failed state. Let me be clear about that.
We built something real: a resilient service economy, a massive and talented diaspora, and a consumer class that has survived crises that would have broken other nations.
Those are genuine achievements.
But we skipped something.
We skipped the hard, unglamorous, and politically difficult work of industrial transformation.
We found an easier path.
We exported people — nurses, domestic helpers, seafarers, factory workers, and drivers. When we were not exporting people, we created an economy that allowed Filipinos to work in business process outsourcing (BPO) while effectively living in another time zone without ever leaving home.
Instead of building factories filled with presses and welding robots, we focused on services, remittances, and consumption.
And we stayed on that path long after we should have challenged ourselves to move toward something harder.
Vietnam did not have an easier path.
Vietnam endured a devastating war, a failed communist experiment, and a generation of its people scattered across the world.
And from that, they built VinFast.
What we need now is to stop admiring that spirit in individuals and start embedding it into institutions, infrastructure, and industrial policy.
We need the willingness to make long, painful, and unglamorous bets on what we want to become — the way Vietnam did in 1986, the way Pham Nhat Vuong did with instant noodles in Ukraine, and the way a factory in Hai Phong announced to the world that a small country had decided it was done being small.