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Vietcombank 2008 pretax profit increases 9.7 percent
Joint-Stock Commercial Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam, the first state-owned lender to sell shares, said pretax profit rose 9.7 percent last year as loans and deposits increased.
Profit rose to VND3.4 trillion (US$194.6 million), Nguyen Phuoc Thanh, the Hanoi-based bank’s chief executive officer, said in an interview Thursday. Pretax profit at Vietcombank, as the lender is known, was VND3.1 trillion ($176.9 million) in 2007.
Vietcombank’s credit and deposits were still “relatively good,” though the central bank imposed a tighter monetary policy last year, Thanh said. Credit growth was at 16.3 percent while deposits rose 11.7 percent, he said, without providing comparative figures.
Total assets mounted to VND220 trillion ($12.6 billion) as of December 31, compared with VND196 trillion ($11.2 billion) a year earlier, Thanh said.
Vietcombank submitted an application to the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange last week to list 112,285,426 shares. The bank delayed the listing on the country’s main bourse in June amid a stock market slump that saw the bench-mark VN-Index slide 66 percent in 2008.
The government raised VND10.5 trillion ($599 million) in December 2007 by selling 6.5 percent of the bank, the first share sale by a state-owned Vietnamese lender.
Bloomberg
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