Having operated in Vietnam since 2003, VinaCapital has in-depth insights into the country and its business culture. We recognise its great potential for growth as well as the potential for value-added enhancement.
Managing environmental, social and governance issues is a key element of our overall investment risk management process and is important to generating long-term returns. Improving the ESG performance of companies in our portfolio is an essential value-creation activity for the investments we make. To help ensure compliance with these values, we have established a responsible investment framework.
Responsible Investment Policy
Our enhanced Responsible Investment Policy was approved by the Board of Directors in 2020.
ESG issues are overseen by our Group CEO, Group CIO, and the Chairman of our ESG Committee. Our ESG and research teams have the experience, training, and tools needed to discover and assess environmental, social, and corporate governance risks and to develop solutions to address them. This helps ensure that our investment teams have the information necessary to make well-informed investment decisions.
We have established a culture in which ESG is embedded in the way we operate, how we expect our staff to behave, how we procure goods and services, and the partnerships we enter.
VinaCapital has been a signatory to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment since October 2018. We have continuously updated our Responsible Investment Policy in accordance with our responsibilities as a signatory. Our approach for listed equity investment follows globally recognised standards for responsible investment:
integration in
our investment
processes
Screening
- ESG exclusion list
- Corporate governance risks
Assessment
- ESG scoring
- ESG Risk categorisation and due diligence for high risk deals
Investment Decision
- Exercise caution with buy/hold decisions on ESG laggards, and maintain active engagement to support performance improvements
Stewardship
- Proxy voting
- Engagement
We are acutely aware of the challenges of investing in developing markets like Vietnam, and the potential implications such challenges can have on the investments we make. For these reasons, a poor ESG score is not necessarily a reason to not invest. If a company’s leadership understands that managing ESG risks is essential to long-term performance and sustainability and has a clear objective and sincere commitment to improving ESG practices, we would consider investing. This is consistent with our aim to inspire and encourage management to create shareholder value by improving ESG practices.
Thematic Investment
Clean energy is a key area of focus for VinaCapital. We invest from our own balance sheet with an objective of being a developer of large-scale renewable and clean energy projects to help lead Vietnam’s transition away from coal-based generation.
We founded SkyX Solar in 2019, now a joint venture with EDF Renewables. The company has 100MW of rooftop solar power in operation throughout Vietnam, with a further pipeline of 200MW.
We established a renewable energy platform with EDF Renewables to develop a 500MW pipeline of onshore wind projects in Central Highlands Vietnam.
We successfully led a move to convert a previously approved coal-fired power plant project in Long An to a 3GW LNG power plant and are currently jointly developing it with GS Energy, a major South Korean energy conglomerate.
VinaCarbon - Sustainable returns, real impact.
VinaCarbon is committed to leading Vietnam’s sustainable development by investing in businesses that can capitalise on green transition and carbon credit opportunities.
In 2025, the team announced its first pilot sustainable forestry investment, covering 1,000 hectares in northern Vietnam, replanting areas destroyed by typhoon Yagi in 2024. The project applies improved forestry management standards and creates 50 skilled local jobs in sustainable forestry. Each hectare is expected to remove 2.5 tons of CO₂ annually through an extended plantation cycle.
VinaCapital is a founder of the Institute for Circular Economy Development under the Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City.
We collaborate with leading global organisations to bring ESG best practices to Vietnam.
We are a signatory to the UN-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), the world’s leading proponents of responsible investing. We are also a founding member of the Vietnam Institute of Directors (VIOD), as part of our commitment to promoting international standards of governance to companies in Vietnam.
We have also established working relationships with leading international development agencies and other leading investment managers to share the common vision of enhancing ESG capacity in Vietnam.
We take social responsibility to our employees and the broader community in Vietnam seriously.
Our employees are our greatest assets, and we focus on fostering a supportive work culture through employee-friendly policies and benefits, regular training programmes, and structured, merit-based career progression. As a testament to this, VinaCapital has been named the “Best Place to Work” in Vietnam’s financial services industry in and ranked among the “100 Best Places to Work” in Vietnam in recent years.