For a tech company, user growth is the easiest story to sell. Once a platform reaches scale, though, investors start asking a different question: has that user base turned into durable cash flow and real profit? That is the test VNG is now walking into after its June 6 annual shareholder meeting, where the company set a full-year profit target for the first time since VNZ began trading on UPCoM.CafeF
The numbers alone are enough to force a reset in how the market reads the name. VNG is targeting 2026 net revenue of VND 12,500 billion to VND 13,500 billion, up 15% to 25% year on year, with pretax profit of VND 300 billion to VND 450 billion.CafeF This is no longer a broad ecosystem pitch. Once management pins the narrative to a profit range, execution becomes measurable.
From scale to efficiency
The most important shift at this year’s meeting was not the introduction of another new product. It was the decision to bring the entire ecosystem back under a single financial test: consolidated profitability. For retail investors, that is the line between a company that is merely popular and one that is starting to look investable on economic terms.
Lê Hồng Minh, Chairman of VNG Corporation (VNZ), made the hierarchy clear. ZaloPay has to move closer to break-even, while the rest of the ecosystem has to prove it can support profits rather than just audience reach.CafeF The practical reading is that VNG is no longer asking investors for time just to build scale. It is asking to be judged on whether that scale can now produce better economics.
Zalo and ZaloPay are the hinge points
Inside the group, Zalo remains the core revenue platform because it still holds the deepest user base. In 2025, monthly active users reached 79.6 million and revenue grew 38% year on year. More importantly, VNG said non-advertising revenue at Zalo exceeded advertising revenue for the first time in 2025.CafeF
That matters because the quality of revenue is changing. Messaging platforms do not automatically become strong businesses just because they dominate attention. They become more valuable when users and businesses start paying for services beyond traffic monetization, reducing reliance on a single advertising engine.
Zalo, however, is not the hardest part of the profit puzzle. That role still belongs to ZaloPay, because digital wallets can grow faster than they mature financially. In 2025, ZaloPay posted revenue of VND 1,111 billion, up 47%. Financial-services revenue climbed 413%, while total payment value rose 76%.CafeFMekong ASEAN
The problem is that faster revenue does not automatically mean profit. Wallet businesses often scale through promotions, merchant subsidies and infrastructure spending. That is why Minh’s target for ZaloPay to reach break-even in 2026 and start reporting profit in 2027 is the single most important milestone in the broader VNG story.Mekong ASEAN
That said, discipline matters here. VNG’s improving earnings could be coming from several places at once: better monetization at Zalo, slower cash burn at ZaloPay, resilient cash generation from gaming, or tighter cost control at the group level. The evidence points to better ecosystem efficiency overall, but it is still too early to say ZaloPay alone explains the turn. That will have to be proven quarter by quarter.
Gaming preserves cash flow while AI expands the story
If ZaloPay is the business that must solve the loss problem, gaming remains the segment that helps preserve cash generation. At the shareholder meeting, VNG said long-life titles accounted for 46% of gaming revenue, while international revenue made up nearly 20% of gross booking value in games.CafeF It is a less glamorous part of the ecosystem, but often a more dependable one because monetization is clearer and commercial turnover is faster.
On the other side of the portfolio, AI infrastructure and cloud services offer the possibility of a richer valuation story, but they also require the most caution. GreenNode now serves more than 1,000 enterprise customers across Southeast Asia, the US and the Middle East, with international revenue making up 68% of the segment’s mix.CafeF That shows the business already has real demand behind it, not just an AI label attached to the pitch.
Still, investors should not jump from “AI has customers” to “AI will soon drive profit.” Infrastructure businesses demand capital for servers, data centers, operations and enterprise sales. The evidence today suggests AI can improve VNG’s revenue mix, but not that it is already a dependable profit engine in the near term.
A good first quarter, and a secondary HOSE story
First-quarter 2026 results gave the recovery narrative more substance. Consolidated net revenue reached VND 2,785 billion, up 32% year on year, while net profit after tax came in at more than VND 125.3 billion versus a loss of nearly VND 15 billion a year earlier.Mekong ASEAN For a company long viewed as a scale story without enough profit conversion, that is enough to change the tone of the conversation.
But one profitable quarter does not settle the cycle. Quarterly earnings can reflect a genuine structural improvement, yet they can also be helped by temporary revenue mix or a short-term phase of cost discipline. What the market needs is not one strong print, but a sequence showing that gross margin, selling expenses, product-development costs and ZaloPay losses are all moving in a more sustainable direction.
That is why the potential move from UPCoM to a main board should be treated as a consequence, not the core thesis. Management said improving stock liquidity is a priority over the next one to two years as VNG works toward the conditions required for a transfer listing. VNZ closed June 5 at VND 317,000 per share, implying a market capitalization of roughly VND 9,500 billion.Mekong ASEAN A better listing venue can improve trading conditions, but it does not answer the more important question of whether the ecosystem is finally producing real profit.
The constructive case for VNG is now clearer than it was when the company was mainly discussed through user reach. There is enough evidence to argue that revenue quality is improving, not just that the ecosystem is large. But for the market to re-rate the stock in a durable way, three signals still need to line up over the next few quarters: Zalo’s non-ad revenue keeps expanding, ZaloPay hits its break-even path, and new growth engines do not let capital intensity swell too quickly. If those pieces hold together, VNG’s profit target stops looking like a promise and starts looking like an earnings story.
