By Bill Horner III, Chatham News + Record
VinFast’s plan, from the start, was ambitious: to roll out electric vehicles from a sparkling new plant at Chatham County’s Triangle Innovation Point by July of 2024.
The Vietnamese carmaker now says those plans have been delayed.
Michael Smith, the president of the Chatham Economic Development Corporation, told the News + Record Friday afternoon he’d informed his board and key county officials VinFast will hold off on the start of vehicle production at the North Carolina facility until 2025. Permitting, construction and other work is continuing.
“This is the result of administrative delays that have forced the company to revise the schedule for the start of full-scale vehicle production,” Smith said. “They remain fully committed to the successful development of their first U.S. production facility in North Carolina and are working to complete development of the site and construction of the facility as quickly as possible.”
Smith said in a call with VinFast officials, he was assured there were no changes in the scope or vision for the project — which, when announced last spring, was the largest in North Carolina history. Plans for the $4.5 billion carmaker’s plant, along with its 7,500 jobs, are still on, Smith said, but a number of factors have interfered with moving forward.
Wolfspeed’s announcement in September to build a microprocessor plant at Siler City’s Chatham Advanced Manufacturing site eclipsed the VinFast project in terms of total investment at $5 billion. Wolfspeed plans to employ 1,800 at its facility.
For VinFast, its original goal was to have cars rolling off an assembly line by July 2024, with a target production of 250,000 premium SUVs per year. The company said it would have an initial production output of 150,000 EVs annually at the plant, which will also produce batteries for the vehicles.
“As we have seen in many businesses, supply chain issues have slowed the progress of their project,” Smith told EDC board members and others in an email Friday afternoon. “They are continuing to work with the many allies and partners here on this transformational project. We have our next team call with them March 14, and we expect to continue on this journey to bring these jobs and investment to our community.”
Smith told the News + Record the project remains “in a very positive light,” with no further changes beyond the delay in EV production.
“There’s no change in scope or vision on the project,” he said. “It’s business as usual there. They are carrying on.”
Supply chain disruptions have compressed VinFast’s timeline, Smith said.
“They’re still going forward, it’s just not going to be July of 2024, which is what we initially had been told,” he said.
Smith said from everything he’s seen, VinFast still “feels good about Chatham County, they feel great about North Carolina.”
Smth, his staff, county and state officials and others involved in the project have been meeting regularly, he said, often with as many as 25 or 30 people involved. The next such meeting is set for next Tuesday.
“I just think they wanted to go ahead and just make the public and make the market aware that they are not going to be hitting the July 24 timeline as they initially had talked about,” Smith said. “But they are still excited about where they are and where we’re headed.”
Chatham County Manager Dan LaMontagne said the county remains confident ‘that there is no change in VinFast’s scope or vision for the project here in Chatham County.’
‘They remain fully committed to the successful development of their first US production facility in Chatham County,” he said, “and we look forward to our continued work to complete development of the site and construction of the facility as quickly as possible.”
VinFast, founded in 2017 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup, is a global producer of premium automobiles. Headquartered in Hanoi, Vietnam, it has a state-of-the-art vehicle production facility in Hai Phong, Vietnam, that has the capacity to produce 950,000 vehicles per year by 2026.
VinFast’s rapid growth has seen it establish global operations in the U.S., Canada, Germany, France and the Netherlands. VinFast currently provides an ecosystem of EV products in its home country of Vietnam, including e-scooters, electric buses and electric cars, charging station system and green energy solutions.
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