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Truong Hai Group Corporation
THACO is a Vietnamese conglomerate that assembles and sells cars and trucks, and has expanded into construction, real estate, agriculture, and logistics.
THACO is Vietnam's homegrown car and truck maker. It assembles vehicles in big factories in central Vietnam — mainly Kia passenger cars, Mazda cars, and its own THACO trucks and buses — and sells them through a huge dealer network across the country. If you drive on a Vietnamese road, there's a decent chance the truck hauling goods past you or the car next to you came out of a THACO plant.
The car business is the core. THACO doesn't design most of its vehicles from scratch; it partners with foreign brands like Kia and Mazda, putting together their cars locally under a joint venture structure, which lets the vehicles dodge steep import taxes. It also builds trucks and buses, where it owns the brand outright and dominates the Vietnamese commercial market. Buyers choose THACO for the same reason they choose any local assembler: lower prices than imports, easier servicing, and a dealer on nearly every corner. The founder, Tran Ba Duong, started in 1997 with a tiny used-car repair shop and grew it into this giant, which is a genuinely remarkable story in a country where big industrial firms are usually state-owned. But THACO didn't stay a car company. It has poured money into a sprawling portfolio: building and operating highways and industrial parks, farming (it owns a large stake in a fruit company and grows produce for export), logistics, and even a mechanical engineering arm that makes parts and railway cars. That diversification cuts both ways — it spreads risk but also spreads focus and capital, and some of these bets are years from paying off.
THACO is private, not listed on a stock exchange, though it has flirted with the idea of an IPO. Its biggest vulnerability is straightforward: it depends heavily on foreign brand partners and on Vietnam's car market, which is small, price-sensitive, and exposed to imported rivals — including Chinese electric vehicles now pushing in. When the economy slows, Vietnamese buyers postpone big purchases like cars, and THACO feels it fast.
Saved answer · last researched 10 Nov 2026