Tesla is coming to Vietnam. That’s not a rumor from a business-registry scrape this time: Tesla’s Asia Pacific recruiting manager, Ricky Ip, posted on Wednesday that “Tesla is officially coming to Vietnam – and we’re hiring,” and linked five full-time Vietnam jobs on Tesla’s own careers site.
The post went up Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 3:41 AM ET / 12:41 AM PT (4:41 PM JST). The openings are a Sales Manager, a Service Manager, an HR Business Partner, a Purchasing Manager and a Project Developer for Charging. Five people isn’t a launch. It is the skeleton of one, and the charging hire is the part that tells you Tesla means it.
What the job ads give away
The Sales Manager reports to a Country Manager and will run teams “across field retail and delivery locations,” handling sales results, deliveries and the local registration process, according to the listing as quoted by Eletric Vehicles. Nobody has been named to that Country Manager job, and it isn’t among the five posted roles. (Somebody, somewhere, is presumably already interviewing for it.)
The Service Manager builds the service team and runs day-to-day operations. The listing says automotive experience is “not a must”, which is very on-brand. The Project Developer, Charging will find sites for Tesla charging products, negotiate with property owners, and work through utility connections and permits, Drive Tesla reports. Vietnam’s VnExpress adds that the charging role asks for someone who can juggle more than 20 projects at different stages at once. That’s not a job you post for two wall chargers at a mall.
The other two round out the office. The Purchasing Manager sits in Tesla’s Asia Pacific indirect purchasing team and should expect to travel about 20% of the time, and the HR partner will also look after the office and facilities, per VietnamFinance. Three of the roles ask for at least five years of experience.
From paperwork to people
The hiring follows the paperwork. Tesla Motors Vietnam LLC was registered in Ho Chi Minh City on Sept. 11 with charter capital of 77.667 billion dong (about $3 million), and its registered business covers vehicle wholesale and retail, parts, and import and export, TechNode Global reports. None of the five ads mentions a factory or assembly, so for now this reads as a sales, service and charging operation.
What we don’t have yet: a launch date, a model lineup, prices, or showroom locations. TeslaNorth notes the job cards on Tesla’s portal don’t even name a city. Tesla itself hasn’t put out a statement beyond the recruiter’s post.
Walking into VinFast’s living room
Vietnam is home turf for VinFast, which builds only EVs and outsells everyone. Vietnamese car sales hit 48,484 in August, and VinFast took 20,161 of them, or 42%, according to TechNode Global. Tesla won’t be fighting gas cars for attention here so much as a local EV brand with a big head start and a charging network of its own.
The move fits a pattern across Asia, where Tesla has been filling in markets one at a time. Here in Japan, Tesla’s lineup comes from Giga Shanghai and the company keeps adding small upgrades for local owners, like the V2L support for the new Model 3 and Model Y we covered last week.
Vietnam drives on the right, so it would need the left-hand-drive cars Giga Shanghai already builds for export, though Tesla hasn’t said where Vietnam’s cars will come from. The first person through the door will be whoever lands that charging job, and they’ve got at least 20 sites to find.
Sources: Ricky Ip (Tesla) on X, Drive Tesla, TeslaNorth, TechNode Global, VnExpress, VietnamFinance, Eletric Vehicles, Sawyer Merritt on X.
— The EVX News team
Featured image: The Ho Chi Minh City skyline and Landmark 81 over the Saigon River at blue hour. Photo: Radek Kucharski / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0, cropped).
