The customer and the site.
Coats plc is a British thread and yarn manufacturer headquartered in London, with operations across more than 50 countries and a 245-year history. By 2019 it was approaching its 30th year of operations in Vietnam, running a thread factory at 48 Tang Nhon Phu Street in District 9 of Ho Chi Minh City through a long-standing joint venture with Phong Phu Corporation.
The factory profile was a clean fit for rooftop solar. Daytime production load — dyeing, thread mills, ancillary plant — gave a strong on-site self-consumption ratio. Roof area was ample (the eventual installation covered around 4,000 m² across four roof items: the material warehouse, the office, the dyeing factory, and the QA building). Coats' parent group was actively setting renewables targets at the global level: by Coats Group CEO Rajiv Sharma's own framing at the launch, the company had moved from roughly 5% renewables in worldwide energy consumption five years earlier to around 27% by 2019.
For SPUC — Vietnam Solar Power Utility Joint Stock Company, the joint venture between Dragon Capital and Rob Santler founded in 2017 as Vietnam's first dedicated C&I solar developer — Coats Phong Phu was the candidate to land the platform's first executed Zero Capex PPA. A 500 kWp Phase 1 system at a credible multinational customer, in a primary metro, with a multinational parent willing to put its CEO on the record about renewables. The site selected itself.
Why this project mattered for the Vietnamese market.
In 2019 the Vietnamese C&I solar market did not yet have a regulatory framework that recognised Zero Capex PPAs as such. Decree 80/2024 on direct power purchase agreements was five years away. Decree 57/2025 was six. The FiT 2 regime under Decision 13/2020 was about to run for one year before the rooftop tariff rate expired at the end of December 2020. The legal architecture customers and lenders rely on today simply wasn't there.
The commercial model SPUC wanted to land — developer builds, owns and operates the system; customer pays nothing upfront; electricity sold under a long-term PPA at a price competitive with the EVN retail tariff — was unproven in Vietnam at scale. A handful of pilots had been attempted; few had reached commercial operation with a multinational counterparty and credible documentation around them. The bottleneck wasn't the technology or the financing; it was the absence of a credible reference deal.
Coats Phong Phu was the candidate to be that reference. A 500 kWp Phase 1 system at a 30-year-old multinational textile operator carries different weight in the market than a pilot at an unnamed industrial-park tenant. If it worked, it gave the next ten Vietnamese C&I customers a deal they could point to. If it didn't, it set the platform back two years.
Sharma also framed the project at the launch as a 20-year power-buying commitment by Coats — explicitly positioning the PPA term as long-dated environmental contracting rather than a short-term cost play. That framing, from a public-company CEO, gave the Vietnamese C&I solar conversation a credibility anchor it had been missing.
How the deal actually came together.
Three counterparties had to align. Coats Phong Phu as host customer and offtaker. SPUC as developer, owner, and PPA seller. EVN through its local distribution unit (HCMC Power Corporation) for the grid connection. The structure SPUC executed was a long-term PPA in which the customer paid nothing upfront for design, construction, installation or grid connection, and bought all electricity generated from the system at a tariff structured to be competitive with EVN's retail rate.
The project drew material support from the UK government. The UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office Prosperity Fund's Supporting Southern Vietnam Solar Photovoltaic Development programme — the Solar Hub initiative — had been set up as a UK-Dragon Capital partnership backing the first wave of credible Vietnamese C&I solar reference deals. Coats Phong Phu was one of the projects the Solar Hub programme actively supported. The inauguration on 21 October 2019 was attended by H.E. Gareth Ward, then British Ambassador to Vietnam, alongside Coats Group CEO Rajiv Sharma, Coats Vietnam MD Bill Watson, and the SPUC team.
The technical scope
Phase 1 covered roughly 4,000 m² of rooftop across four buildings — material warehouse, office, dyeing factory, and QA building — at a total installed capacity near 500 kWp. Annual generation projected at 823 MWh, displacing approximately 494 tonnes of CO₂ per year against the Vietnamese grid emission factor. All electricity generated routed to on-site consumption rather than grid export, keeping the commercial structure clean of the export-pricing question that would later become a regulatory pinch point under Decree 58/2025.
What was harder than it looks
Three things mattered more than the engineering:
- Convincing a global thread group's CFO that a 20-year PPA on a single roof was a serious instrument. Coats sits in 50+ countries; this was their first Zero Capex PPA in any of them. The diligence had to clear London, not just HCMC.
- Sequencing the EVN grid-connection paperwork against the construction schedule. Pre-Decree 58, the procedural pathway was ambiguous in places. SPUC carried that ambiguity rather than passing it to the customer — table-stakes for a Zero Capex offer where the developer is supposed to absorb the regulatory complexity.
- Holding a tariff that was both competitive against EVN retail and bankable for the developer over 20 years. No FiT 2 yet; no DPPA framework yet; the deal had to stand on its bilateral commercial logic alone.
What the project delivered, and what it set up after.
At commercial operation in October 2019, the project delivered against its three operational targets: 500 kWp installed, generating roughly 823 MWh per year, avoiding approximately 494 tonnes of CO₂ annually. Coats captured the planned electricity-cost reduction; SPUC opened operations on its first executed Zero Capex PPA; the UK Prosperity Fund booked a commissioned reference under the Solar Hub initiative.
Beyond the operational numbers, three things mattered more in the longer arc:
- The reference deal SPUC needed was on the ground. The next dozen Vietnamese C&I prospects who asked "has anyone actually done this?" had a 500 kWp answer in District 9 with a multinational customer and a public-company CEO on record about it. The first credible reference deal in any market disproportionately shapes what comes after; Coats Phong Phu was that reference for SPUC's Zero Capex book.
- The platform thesis validated. SPUC went on to scale the Zero Capex PPA template across Vietnamese C&I rooftops — anchor multinational customers, repeatable commercial structure, in-house operations and maintenance. The book Rob led at SPUC over 2017–2021 grew on the back of being able to point to Coats and similar deals.
- The platform itself was acquired. In 2021, SPUC was acquired by BECIS (Berkeley Energy Commercial Industrial Solutions), and continued operating under the BECIS group. Rob transitioned to General Manager Vietnam & Cambodia at BECIS through 2022, then to CEO of CN Green Roof Asia. The Coats Phong Phu PPA continues to operate under BECIS Vietnam today.
Operated by BECIS Vietnam since 2021.
SPUC was acquired by BECIS in 2021. The Coats Phong Phu rooftop solar PPA is currently operated by BECIS Vietnam under continuing customer contract and ongoing operations and maintenance. The asset has been generating since October 2019; as of writing, that's over six years of continuous commercial operation.
The credibility transfers. The contract doesn't.
The Coats Phong Phu PPA sits with BECIS Vietnam, not with Arcus Energy and not with Rob personally. The customer relationship, the commercial documentation, and the ongoing O&M obligations are all BECIS group's. That is the right outcome — when SPUC was acquired, the contracts moved with the platform, as they were always going to.
What does transfer is the operating background. The credit-committee diligence on a Zero Capex PPA that no Vietnamese precedent yet supported. The HCMC Power Corporation grid-connection process when the procedural pathway was ambiguous. The multinational CFO conversation about how a 20-year power-buying commitment can be both lower-cost and ESG-positive. The British Embassy launch event mechanics. None of that is information sitting on a BECIS server — it sits in the operating fluency that informs Arcus's advisory work today.
This page is a track-record case study, not a current Arcus customer reference. Where current Arcus engagements reach commercial close with publishable customer references, those will appear on the case-studies page separately and clearly distinguished from the prior-role record.
Three lessons from Coats that still apply in 2026.
These are not retrospective reframings — they're the operating heuristics SPUC built around Coats Phong Phu and the projects that followed it, and they continue to shape how Arcus approaches Vietnamese C&I solar advisory today.
1. Vietnamese C&I customers will sign Zero Capex if the regulatory wrapper is right.
Coats signed in 2019 against zero regulatory clarity on Zero Capex PPAs. They signed because the commercial structure was bilateral, the developer absorbed the regulatory complexity, and the multinational counterparty was credible enough to make the diligence work. The lesson generalises: Vietnamese C&I customers are not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is whether the developer and advisory team can present a wrapper that closes off the regulatory ambiguity for the customer. Where Decree 57, Decree 58 and Circular 62 have now made that wrapper much cleaner — but the principle is the same as it was in 2019.
2. Multinational backing matters but isn't sufficient — local execution is the gate.
The UK Prosperity Fund, the British Ambassador's attendance, the Coats CEO's public statements — all of that helped land the project. None of it would have closed the deal without SPUC's local team executing the EVN connection process, the HCMC Power Corporation paperwork, and the construction schedule against the launch date. The lesson generalises: external endorsement opens doors but doesn't finish projects. For any Vietnamese C&I solar or BESS engagement, the question to ask first is who is doing the local execution and what is their track record on the procedural side.
3. The first reference deal in any new market disproportionately shapes what comes after.
Coats was SPUC's first Zero Capex PPA. It set the template the next dozen deals were patterned on — same commercial structure, same documentation flow, same EVN engagement playbook. Get the first one wrong and you re-engineer for two years. Get it right and the platform compounds. That's why Arcus's current advisory engagements weight the first-deal due diligence harder than the volume-deal pricing — particularly for offtakers building out a rolling portfolio (the De Heus pattern, the Korean MNC pattern) where the first PPA sets the template for the next ten.