VNG: The Company That Owns Vietnam’s Gaming

VNG Corporation is the largest domestically-owned games publisher in Vietnam — the company that proved a local champion could hold its ground against the global giants. It reported VND 10.89 trillion (about $419 million) in revenue in 2025, up 17.5%, with gaming contributing roughly $267 million, around two-thirds of the business (The Investor). Its messaging app Zalo reaches close to 80 million monthly users, and its e-wallet ZaloPay is the country’s number two. China’s Tencent is its largest shareholder. By our estimate VNG holds around 55% of Vietnam’s domestic gaming market — up from 24.5% in 2020 (Niko Partners) — making it the country’s runaway domestic champion. It is genuinely Vietnam’s gaming heavyweight. But two claims often bolted onto that dominance — that VNG owns MoMo and Sky Mavis — are simply wrong, and untangling what VNG actually controls from what it doesn’t is the point of this piece.

How dominant is VNG, really?

VNG is the runaway number-one domestic publisher. By our estimate it holds around 55% of Vietnam’s domestic gaming market — a level no global publisher has matched locally. That figure is a Digital in Asia assessment rather than a published third-party number, but the trajectory supports it: Niko Partners put VNG at 24.5% of Vietnam’s online game market in 2020, and its lead has widened materially since, with three titles across the country’s top-10 download and revenue charts.

For context on the denominator, VNG’s gaming revenue was around $267 million in 2025 against a total domestic market Niko Partners put near $655 million in 2024 — though VNG’s reach extends well beyond its own published titles, through distribution, platform ownership and licensing, which is part of why its effective market control runs ahead of its direct revenue share. The market is still genuinely contested: Garena, VTC, Gamota, Funtap and a long tail of cross-border publishers compete hard, and the Vietnam Investment Review notes that global competition has “nearly erased the home-field advantage” local firms once enjoyed. VNG leads decisively — but it leads a real contest, which is what makes the 55% hold so striking.

How did VNG build its position?

VNG started in 2004 as VinaGame, built around Zing — a PC gaming and content platform that became a backbone of early Vietnamese internet life. From there it expanded into messaging, payments, cloud and game publishing, with vertical integration as the strategy. Two assets did most of the work.

The first is Zalo. Vietnam’s dominant messaging app passed 79.6 million monthly active users by the end of 2025, reaching the overwhelming majority of the country’s online population (company-reported, via VietnamNet). For VNG, Zalo is a distribution engine no rival can match: when it launches a game into the Zalo ecosystem, it reaches tens of millions of users without paying the $1-to-$5 install costs that international publishers face. That is a real, structural advantage, and it is the heart of VNG’s edge.

The second is ZaloPay, VNG’s own e-wallet — and here is where the record needs correcting. ZaloPay is consistently Vietnam’s number-two e-wallet, reaching around 20 million active users by mid-2025. It is not the market leader, and it is not MoMo.

The MoMo myth: VNG does not own Vietnam’s biggest wallet

A persistent claim about VNG is that it controls MoMo, the e-wallet with around 68% market share. This is simply wrong, and it’s worth stating plainly because the error has propagated across the web. MoMo is operated by M_Service, a completely separate company — backed by Warburg Pincus, Goodwater and others, and valued in the billions after a Series E raise in early 2025. VNG has no ownership or control of MoMo.

VNG’s wallet is ZaloPay, a different product and the number-two player behind MoMo. The 68% figure that gets attached to VNG is real, but it belongs to MoMo and dates from a 2023 Decision Lab survey; by 2025 the market had loosened, with the top five wallets together holding around 65%. So the accurate picture is the inverse of the myth: VNG competes against the dominant wallet, it doesn’t own it.

Sky Mavis and Axie Infinity: an investment, not a subsidiary

The same correction applies to Sky Mavis, the Ho Chi Minh City studio behind Axie Infinity and the play-to-earn boom of 2021. Sky Mavis is an independent company, founded by Trung Nguyen and partners, and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel and Paradigm at a peak valuation around $3 billion. VNG was an early investor — not the owner. Calling Sky Mavis a VNG subsidiary, as is sometimes done, overstates the relationship.

The Axie story matters to Vietnamese gaming, but it’s Sky Mavis’s story, not VNG’s. After the $620 million Ronin bridge hack in March 2022, the AXS token fell from its peak to a market capitalisation around $200 million by early 2026 — a cautionary tale about play-to-earn that sits alongside, not inside, VNG’s business.

What actually makes VNG hard to displace?

Strip out the myths and VNG’s real moat is still substantial, built on two genuine advantages rather than four imagined ones.

The first is distribution through Zalo. Owning the country’s dominant messaging platform means VNG distributes games to an audience it already reaches, at near-zero marginal acquisition cost — an advantage no competitor, domestic or foreign, can replicate.

The second is regulatory positioning. When Vietnam’s Decree 147 took effect in late 2024, tightening licensing and requiring local compliance, VNG was already a two-decade-old Vietnamese company fully inside the rules. International publishers faced fresh compliance costs and months of restructuring to keep operating; VNG faced almost none. Twenty years of operating as a local entity turned into a regulatory head start exactly when the rules tightened.

Is VNG actually profitable?

Not yet — and this is the part the “empire” framing tends to skip. VNG is loss-making, posting a net loss of about VND 231 billion ($8.9 million) in 2025, its fifth straight annual loss, though sharply narrower than the roughly $45 million it lost in 2024. The trajectory is improving and operating profit turned slightly positive, but VNG is a scale-and-growth story, not a profit machine.

Its planned US listing reflects the same reality. VNG filed to list on Nasdaq in August 2023, postponed the September listing, and formally withdrew the filing in January 2024. It has not relisted since. And its ownership tells you who really underwrites the business: Tencent is the largest economic shareholder, with a reported stake around half the company economically, though co-founder Le Hong Minh retains the largest block of voting rights.

What VNG’s story really tells us

VNG is the genuine article — a domestic champion that built real infrastructure (Zalo, ZaloPay, cloud, a deep publishing catalogue) and used it to stay ahead of global publishers in its home market. That’s a meaningful achievement in a region where local firms usually lose to the giants. It fits the wider Vietnamese pattern we’ve documented: a country that punches far above its weight in gaming, explored in our Vietnam gaming market findings and the regional Asia gaming market pillar.

But the accurate version is more useful than the mythic one. VNG leads its home market by our estimate at around 55% — but it competes against MoMo, it doesn’t own it, and it invested early in Sky Mavis, it doesn’t control it. And it is still loss-making, backed by Tencent, with its monetisation problem unsolved. The real challenge isn’t holding share — it’s turning Vietnam’s enormous, low-spending audience into a profitable one. That, not any imagined empire, is the question that decides VNG’s future.

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