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VNG makes online games, messaging apps, payments, cloud services and AI tools for people and businesses in Vietnam.
VNG is Vietnam's homegrown internet company, and its most famous product is Zalo, a messaging app that almost everyone in the country uses to chat, share news, and pay for things. Alongside Zalo, it runs one of Vietnam's biggest online game businesses — publishing popular titles and, in some cases, building its own. It also offers cloud computing and AI services to businesses, and it runs a digital payments arm, ZaloPay, that lets people pay by phone.
The money comes from a few places. Games bring in cash from players who buy in-game items, and from distributing titles in Vietnam. Zalo makes money mainly through advertising and its payment services. The cloud and AI side sells computing power and tools to companies that would rather rent than build their own systems. For a Vietnamese consumer or small business, VNG is often the easiest on-ramp to the internet economy: one app handles chatting, paying, and getting services. The company started life as VinaGame, a small game publisher founded in 2004, and grew into one of the country's first tech "unicorns" — a private startup valued at over a billion dollars. In early 2023 it listed on the Hanoi Stock Exchange, giving outside investors a way to own a piece of Vietnam's digital economy. That listing was unusual because VNG remains a young, founder-led company in a fast-growing but sometimes volatile market.
The business is closely tied to Vietnam's fortunes. Internet use is booming, but the company faces tough competition from foreign giants like Meta, whose Facebook competes with Zalo for attention, and from other regional game and payment players. Its growth bets — cloud, AI, and payments — are promising but spend a lot of money before they pay off. For investors, VNG is essentially a bet that Vietnam's growing middle class will keep spending more of its time and money online.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026