Vietnam’s electric car maker Vinfast has announced that it has broken ground on a new factory in India’s Tamil Nadu. At the same time it has asked India for import tax breaks on ready-made electric vehicles from its factory in Vietnam, Reuters is reporting.
Vinfast has made a number of big announcements with respect to new factories. There is a US$4 billion plant in North Carolina underway, a US$200 million assembly plant planned for Indonesia; and now the new US$2 billion project in Tamil Nadu. This is in the context of a company that is losing more than US$2 billion a year.
This may actually shed some light on these plans in that it looks a lot like the strategy may be to build–or at least promise–a factory in exchange for tax breaks.