The current attention of the market has been concentrated on the fact that VNG, an online gaming firm, is going to have an IPO in the US.
However, according to VNG, Le Hong Minh, Chairman and CEO of VNG and Bob McCooey, vice president of Nasdaq, have just signed a preliminary agreement.
Nasdaq is the second largest bourse in the world, and it sets strict requirements on companies which want to list their shares. It is the destination point of big names in the world, from Apple, Microsoft, Google to Facebook, Ebay and Amazon.
Tech corporations throughout Asia also conduct IPOs there. Alibaba’s IPO campaign in 2014 helped the company mobilize US$25 billion in capital.
VNG’s CEO Le Hong Minh said if VNG wants to become the leading tech corporation in Vietnam and stand on a par with global groups, it will have to accept to ‘join the global play’, i.e. it needs to compete with global products and approach capital from global investors.
Minh affirmed that VNG can satisfy all the requirements to be eligible for listing shares on Nasdaq. In terms of operation scale, though its charter capital is only $15 million, it can gain hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year.
In terms of position, World Startup Report listed VNG’s valuation at over $1 billion in 2014. At that time, VNG’s Zalo only attracted 20 million users.
Meanwhile, the number of users increased to 70 million. This gives VNG a reason to believe that is value has increased.
Zalo entered the Myanmar market in mid-2016 and got 2 million users just after four months.
VNG has gained big achievements in mobile games, a major source of income. In 2016, VNG Game Studio’s products, displayed in 15 languages, had 70 million mobile users in 233 countries.
VNG earned US$320 million in turnover from mobile games in 2016 and the group believes the figure may increase twofold by 2020.
VNG puts high hopes on investment in Tiki, an e-commerce website in Vietnam, because market is expected to grow by 80 percent per annum, even higher than mobile games and online ads.
Henry D Fahman, president and CEO of PHI Group, a consultancy firm, believes that Vietnamese businesses are capable of listing on American bourses. They can also list shares on Nasdaq but there is no need to list on HSX or HNX first.
