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Dragon Capital unloads Sacombank
Dragon Capital has reportedly sold its entire 8.17-per-cent stake in Sacombank (HOSE: STB) to two other foreign companies, ending a 10-year investment in the bank.
The negotiated price of the shares was said to be higher than their current market value on the HCM City Stock Exchange. STB closed yesterday's session at VND13,800 per share.
"Buying and selling stocks is a normal activity for an investment fund like Dragon Capital, so we need not to comment on whether our company has sold the shares," said Dragon Capital's director for business development Pham Nguyen Vinh.
However, Dragon Capital was known to have planned to sell its entire stake in the bank since late last year, but it took time to negotiate a price, the investment group's CEO Dominic Scriven told the newspaper Sai Gon Tiep Thi (Sai Gon Marketing).
The sale was a strategic divestment to restructure the fund's portfolio, reducing the weight of banking shares while increasing investment in other sectors, Scriven said, noting that it was an appropriate time to realise gains from the STB shares while investing in other companies with potential.
Dragon Capital has also sold holdings in Southern Bank and VPBank within the past two years. However, the latest deal took place at the time when STB has faced rumours that it was a takeover target.
The volume of STB shares exchanged through negotiation yesterday on the HCM City Stock Exchange was remarkably high, accounting for as much as 63 per cent of the bourse's negotiated volume.
If a specific group of investors wanted to take over STB by purchasing the shares that Dragon Capital has sold, they would have to pay even more for the shares than the price for which they were acquired in the current deal. The number of shares transferred was also not enought to shift control of the bank.
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