Stock market needs giants to develop
Increasing the operation scale and the marketization value is the willing of every listed company, especially when the Vietnamese stock market is still lacking “big guys.”
The move of enterprises
Le Thi Hoa, a member of the board of management of Vietcombank, said that the bank still has not listed 1.6 billion shares of as announced in the second quarter of 2011 absolutely because of the willing of the bank, not because of the difficulties in following administrative procedures.
Vietcombank is considering listing its shares at reasonable moments. When asked about the listing, Hoa said that as per request by shareholders, all the 1.6 billion shares would be listed. Especially, the bank’s board of management decided to list all the shares because when assessing the “health” of a bank, experts always consider the marketization value together with other indexes, such as the total assets, revenue, profits and ROE and ROA.
Hoa has also revealed that in the near future, after fulfilling the procedures to issue more shares to sell to the strategic partner Mitzuho, Vietcombank would list the shares on the bourse. By that time, Vietcombank’s shares would amount to 8-9 percent of the marketization value of the HCM City Stock Exchange.
The stock market is believed to welcome more big guys in the time to come, since big enterprises have merged or they are considering merging into each other. Vinpearl has merged into Vincom, while subsidiaries of FPT are planning to merge into the holding company.
Truong Dinh Anh, General Director of FPT (the Corporation for Financing and Promoting Technology) has asked the Ministry of Finance and the State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC), a big shareholder of FPT Telecom for the permission to merge FPT Telecom into FPT.
Prior to that, three subsidiaries of FPT, including FPT Trading, FIS and Fsoft, after a period of operating as joint stock companies, have merged again into FPT.
Anh went on to say that the first steps in the negotiations with the big shareholder have been carried out, while having affirmed that the group has financially prepared for the deals.
The decision to merge and enlarge the operation scale has been explained by enterprises that they need to restructure to optimize their operation. Anh has revealed that FPT is building up its business plan for 2012, under which, despite the forecast big difficulties, the group still plans to obtain the high growth rate of 30-35 percent in 2012.
The taste of investors
In the third quarter of 2011, a group of foreign investors comprising of big investment institutions in the world, headed by JP Morgan Chase, had a working session with the Hanoi Stock Exchange to learn about investment opportunities. The group of investors also visited 4-5 big enterprises which are listing their shares on the bourse.
After the working session, investors, in the talk with some Vietnamese economists, noted that the listing enterprises have too small scale of operation which still cannot meet their requirements. Meanwhile, as for these investors, they need to invest at least 50 million dollars in every share.
Therefore, analysts believe that when the scale of the Vietnamese stock market gets bigger, and the market has more valuable commodities, will it be able to attract more investors, especially the big ones.
In related news, Financial Times has quoted Tran Dac Sinh, Managing Director of the HCM City Stock Exchange as saying during his working visit to South Africa that Vietnam is considering merging two stock markets. He said that the idea is being considered in the context when regional countries all believe that the merging is necessary in order to preserve the capital market.
Sinh told the newspaper that Vietnam remains a small market while Vietnam needs to improve its competitiveness. In order to do that, Vietnam should merge its bourses, like other regional countries.
Russia, Turkey and Japan have all announced the plan to merge their stock markets.
vietnamnet
|