Day 8: Today we visited the company named VinaCapital, had our Vietnamese lesson, then had a lesson on history, religion and the philosophical principles of Vietnam. The visit to Vinacapital enlightened me on a number of things, such as investments and finance in general. My background on the subject is a little shaky, so bear with me if I end up saying something that doesn’t make sense.

Vinacapital is an investment firm that does work internationally, but mostly locally in the country of Vietnam. The name Vina actually stands for Vietnam, and fun fact, the government no longer allows anyone to put Vina in the front of their name because everyone thinks its one big corporation but technically nothing runs off of each other. Anyways VinaCapital has multiple funds that they use to invest in and earn capital back. The money invested in can range from a number of things. In Vietnam, they can use one fund to cover almost all of real estate and properties. In other countries, one would have to develop separate funds to deal with different forms of real estate, like development and management of existing properties. However, because Vietnam is a developing world and an emerging economy, a lot of it can be pushed together into one big fund.

Many would think that because Vietnam is a communist country, that the government would play a big part in the financial side of it. This is not entirely true, they do play a role in a couple of different areas, such as that foreign investors cannot own more than 30% of a bank. Many of the other ideals of finance and investment work similar to the US and other Western country.

VinaCapital also has the VinaCapital Foundation, which has no direct ties to anything VinaCapital actually does, however it is a way for VinaCapital to given back to the community they have achieved so much from. While I did not understand most of what happened today, I feel like I learned a lot.