[HO CHI MINH CITY] Despite shelving its US listing plans, GIC-backed Vietnamese tech company VNG is banking on its gaming and AI-focused cloud businesses to go global.

“The real push for us to go global has been our core gaming business. This is a big driver for us to build teams overseas,” said Hawkins Pham, director at VNGGames Publishing Platform. He was speaking to The Business Times on the sidelines of a recent marketing summit for top executives in Ho Chi Minh City.

Vietnam’s first tech unicorn derives a majority of its revenue from the gaming segment. In FY2023, the division contributed about 75 per cent to the group’s total revenue of 8.61 trillion dong (S$460 million). As at the second quarter of 2023, the gaming division had more than 78 million active users, largely from South-east Asia and Taiwan.