Adayroi

» see adayroi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the name i know is vingroup. in 2026 they make electric cars that turn up in headlines about vietnam's answer to tesla. adayroi was an earlier part of the same company, the part that tried to sell the whole country its groceries and phones online, and it left so quietly that most people outside vietnam never learned it existed. i am one of them. i read about it after the fact, which is the only honest way i can write this.

vingroup is the kind of conglomerate that does not really translate. it builds apartment towers and hospitals, and around 2014 it decided vietnam needed a homegrown amazon before amazon or alibaba got there properly. adayroi launched that august with a pitch aimed straight at a local anxiety, that everything on it would have a verified origin and would not turn out to be a fake. for a market where a lot of online goods were exactly that, it was a real promise. traffic climbed to something like six million visits a month.

the trouble was the same one every marketplace in the region hit. adayroi burned cash to compete with shopee and lazada, the regionally funded giants who were happy to lose money for years to buy the market. vingroup had deep pockets but a different plan. it was quietly deciding that retail was not where it wanted to be at all, and a shopping site losing money every quarter was the easiest thing to let go of.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the day it died ~

the end came fast and corporate. in early december 2019 vingroup announced it would merge adayroi into vinid, its loyalty and payments app, which everyone read correctly as a soft way of saying the marketplace was closing. the site stopped taking orders at six in the evening on 17 december. within the same month the group also handed its supermarket chain to masan and shut its electronics stores, walking out of consumer retail in one clean quarter. adayroi was not singled out, to be honest, it was just standing in a business the owner had decided to leave.

~ what got buried with it ~

what died with adayroi was the idea that vietnam would grow its own amazon from the inside. after it closed, the market belonged to the outside money, shopee and lazada, the same players it had spent five years trying to outlast. vingroup took the cash and the engineers and pointed them at cars and phones instead, and vinfast is the company the world hears about now. adayroi is the part of the story nobody tells, a large well-funded shopping site that simply stopped being worth the parent's attention. it did not fail so much as get overruled.

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