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Foreign money flocking into Vietnam’s stocks
The warming up of the stock market has been attracting more and more foreign cash flow.
Investment funds seeking opportunities
In mid May, GAP flew to Vietnam to seek investment opportunities. With the members being professional finance service companies, GAP has been keeping a wide operation scale, while it still has been reaching out to strategic markets in Asia and North America.
GAP and some partners in Japan have set up an investment fund with the total capital of $250 million to make investments in Vietnam. The fund aims at investments in infrastructure and production fields.
Quam, a Hong Kong-based finance service group, which is managing the Asia investment fund, has also expanded its investment scope to Vietnam. Quam’s Chairman Bernard Pouliot said that Vietnam now has a lot of opportunities, and that Quam will not miss the opportunities.
Saigon Asset Management (SAM), which is now managing two listed investment funds in Germany, VEH and VPH, has also announced that the fund has profuse money and that it plans to inject money in the real estate sector in Hanoi and HCM City. SAM will target private companies with feasible projects.
The managing director of a big investment fund in HCM City said that its financial capability is quite different from that of 2008. The fund said it is seeking opportunities to disburse the capital it got after successfully withdrawing capital from some companies.
Shareholders raising ownership ratios
Not only investment funds, other foreign shareholders in companies also plan to raise their ownership ratios. Citigroup Global Market ltd (CGML) and Citigroup Global Market Financial Products Ltd (CGMFP), two foreign shareholders of Tan Tien Plastics Company (TTP), purchased 46,000 shares in mid April, raising the total shares they hold from 892,030 shares, or 5.95 percent of TTP shares, to 938,030 shares, or 6.25 percent.
CGML and CGMFP had every reason to do that. Despite the big difficulties of the domestic and world’s economies, TTP still obtained satisfactory results in Q1 with profit up by 125 percent over Q1 2008.
The foreign shareholders of Taicera (TCR), Charmstar Business Corporation, also purchased 20,000 more shares of the company, raising their ownership ratio to 16.64 percent.
Thai Seamico Securities Company is planning to raise its ownership ratio from 11.88 percent to 49 percent in Vietnam’s Thanh Cong Securities Company.
According to Bernard Pouliot, some people say the Asian finance market has been slowing down due to the global finance crisis. Of course, the crisis has caused difficulties for companies and investment funds, but investment opportunities have also opened up to investors.
An investor said that if the VN Index stays at 400 points through the end of the year, the investors who purchased stocks when the index was 300 points would still be able to get the profit of 25 percent, which is really high profit in the current circumstances. That explains why investment funds, foreign investors and professional investors are injecting money in stocks.
VietNamNet, DT
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