Erecting an EV charging network in a country is one thing - I don't see Vietnam having that kind of money, maybe I am wrong. Manufacturing or assembling vehicles is another issue.
Manufacturing? like I stated before maybe from 2035/40 onward - till then it is assembly which includes sourcing parts from all over the world - mostly from China.
maybe
All these "new" car manufacturers are heavily subsidized via direct government sponsoring or via going public. It will take more then 15 years to find out if they are actually self-sustainable.
E.g. Malaysia's Proton, etc. hasn't earned a single cent in the past 25 years - but cost the government billions of subsidies.
VW said - no thank you. Now they have a Chinese major shareholder - who is struggling to gain a future profit via drawing all essential and costly parts from his China plants, maybe even from Vietnamese suppliers.
Korea - due to it's own well developed car industry is a smaller but good market for e.g. Mercedes - around 75,000 units last year. taking logistics - import taxes etc. into account Mercedes China will continue to deliver that market with it's respective manufactured models. So I don't think that a Mercedes plant Vietnam in e.g. 15 years is going to take that share. But they will concentrate onto the Vietnamese market and it's immediate surroundings.
Personally I totally disagree with this Mr. Yale Zhang. (he is a simple US tool and China basher just like this Gordon Chang and many others).
Fact is that all foreign OEM's do not control the market activities aka customers - these are "exclusively" managed by the Chinese partners themselves.
Not because China forced them to do so - but simply due to the fact that Western managers in vast majority do not speak Chinese or have the basic understanding towards Chinese culture and therefore it's consumer demands.
Example: Rich or good income Chinese love big and fat cars. So e.g. BMW is manufacturing L5 series and L3 series and even a 2 series specially produced for the Chinese market. You can't get them anywhere else. BMW only expanded considerably from 2010 onward upon agreeing towards their Chinese sales partners to produce what the Chinese customer wants and not as to what models BMW Munich decides.
The other reason is that no Western OEM was willing to invest billions into a sales network - aka 4S shops - dealerships. - thus these dealerships are entirely Chinese/HK/Taiwan owned and many are owned by the respective Chinese JV partners or their networks.
As such neither the Western OEM nor the Chinese JV partner would be interested to change that profit making arrangement. What might happen is that sole Chinese manufacturers such as Geely, or Great-wall will come up with better performing cars - and this might change the overall perspective of a Chinese or whatever customer to prefer e.g. an EV BYD (240,000Rmb) over an E535 BMW for 600,000Rmb. - it's called natural market displacement.
And naturally all being competitors, e.g. SAIC/VW or SAIC/Audi or FAW/Audi will do their possible best not to loose their own market share to another competitor.
