|
Securities companies recovering from serious illness
The good news from the stock market has helped securities companies recover from serious illness. However, experts say that one should not expect the companies to return to full strength immediately.
A grain of salt in the open sea
At 0.30 am on May 19, an employee of a securities company called Dau tu chung khoan newspaper, complaining that he was still on duty at the company, running the offset payment system.
In general, the work starts at 5-6 pm and finishes at 10-11 pm. However, for the last two months, he has had to work until 1 am.
He said that previously, when the market was quiet and there were few transactions, there was not much offset payment work to be done. However, as the market has become warmer in the last two months, he has been up to his ears in work.
As a result, the company has had to assign its staffs to work in shifts. Statistics show that in the last two months, the transaction volume on HOSE alone has hovered around 50 million units a day, worth 1,500 billion. The record transaction volume has been 68 million units with the total value of 1,600 billion.
Some people have said that the age of securities companies has returned, as the stock market has been warming up with more transactions, which means higher brokerage fees and higher turnover for securities companies.
However, experts have pointed out that the increases in the service fees recently just have been able to help the companies reduce losses, they have not been flourishing.
It is estimated that a medium-class company can get 100 million dong a month from brokerage fees, while smaller ones can get several tens of million dong. Meanwhile, they still have to pay nearly one billion dong a month to maintain their operations.
The said employee said that though he has to work late at night, they do not get much overtime work.
“The transaction fees, which many people think are very big, are in fact just a grain of salt at this moment, while securities companies are still facing a lot of difficulties,” he said.
“Therefore, it is quite understandable why securities companies do not have much money to pay to staff,” he added.
Don’t expect too much
Recently, a lot of capital transfer affairs have been carried out, in which the capital transferors were small securities companies which needed capital to avoid possible bankruptcy, and companies which needed more capital to have the legal capital required by the laws.
Most recently, a successful stake transfer deal has been reported: 18 percent of chartered capital, 6,796,500 stakes of Thanh Cong Securities Joint Stock Company, has been transferred to Thailand’s SEAMICO.
Prior to that, the market witnessed the deal of Phu Hung, which sold 13.2 percent of its chartered capital (1,785,000 stakes) to Quang Huy Consultancy and Investment Company Ltd in order to raise its chartered capital from 100 billion dong to 135 billion dong.
Hoa Anh Dao Securities Company has transferred stakes to two foreign organisations, Japan’s Aizawa Securities Co Ltd (594,500 shares, or 14.5 percent of chartered capital), and Japan Asia Holding Co Ltd (also 594,500 shares).
Many securities companies have submitted business reports for the first quarter and first four months of 2009. Except a few big securities companies which reported profit in Q1, like SSI and HCM Securities Company, most other companies are still struggling to overcome difficulties.
VietNamNet, DTCK
|
