🥖 Coffee, metros, and ports

Happy Sunday,

This is your weekly Bánh Mì Brief.

In today‘s episode: Highlands Coffee brews its strongest profits in two years while plotting an IPO splash, HCMC’s metro swallows a $5.3M loss (but don’t hit the panic button), and Vingroup eyes a $352M port to ship its empire worldwide.

Enjoy the read!

Vietnam’s coffee powerhouse Highlands Coffee just served its strongest quarterly profit in two years, with Q3 2025 EBITDA at around PHP 666 billion (about US$11.3 million), up more than 17% year-on-year, driven by a 17%-plus surge in same-store sales and a network of nearly 1,000 stores across Vietnam and overseas. The chain now contributes close to a third of Jollibee’s coffee-and-tea segment profit, making Vietnam’s iced coffee habit a very lucrative one for the Philippine parent.

In addition, the IPO story is finally heating up again. Management has revived plans to list Highlands within the next 18–24 months, with Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi as the preferred venues, while Singapore, Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, and the US remain backup options. Earlier chatter put the company’s valuation around US$800 million for a minority stake, but with profits now at a two‑year high and store count still growing, investors will likely have to pay up for their caffeine fix.

Ho Chi Minh City’s first metro line has published its early numbers, and the headline looks ugly: VND 142 billion (about US$5.3 million) loss in the first six months of operation. HCMC Urban Railways No. 1 Company (HURC1), operator of the Ben Thanh–Suoi Tien Line 1, booked ticket revenue of roughly VND 104 billion but is still carrying accumulated losses from the pre‑revenue years since its establishment in 2019.

Look under the hood, and the story is less dramatic. The operator says the loss is largely temporary, driven by timing of cost recognition rather than a collapse in ridership. Since trial operations began in late 2024, Metro Line 1 has carried around 17 million passengers with fares capped at VND 20,000 per ride and discounted monthly passes, while the city targets hundreds of billions of dong in revenue and a near-breakeven result by year-end.

Strategically, Line 1 is still the opening chapter in a much bigger urban transit play. The 19.7 km line, costing about VND 43.7 trillion (US$1.7 billion), connects downtown Ben Thanh to Thu Duc City and anchors plans to complete at least three metro lines before 2030 under new special mechanisms granted by the National Assembly. If anything, the early red ink is the classic infrastructure story: losses today, city-shaping externalities tomorrow.

Vingroup is quietly building itself into a logistics powerhouse. Ha Tinh authorities have approved the group’s plan to develop Son Duong International Port in the Vung Ang Economic Zone, with total investment of about VND 8.8 trillion (US$352 million). The project will span more than 120 hectares and include three wharves capable of welcoming 100,000‑DWT vessels and handling up to 11 million tonnes of cargo annually.

The timing is no accident. Vingroup already operates an EV battery plant (VinES) and an auto complex (VinFast) in the same Ha Tinh cluster, and is also pursuing a separate US$14 billion seaport and logistics hub project further north. By owning both the factories and the deep-water gateway, the group is turning Vietnam’s central coast into its own export launchpad, controlling not just what it builds, but how fast it can ship it to the world.

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See you next week! 🥖