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FPTS cancels listing plan as market drops
FPT Securities Joint-Stock Comapny , a brokerage unit of FPT Corporation, Vietnam’s biggest publicly traded telecommunication and software company, canceled its share listing scheduled for next month amid a stock-market slump.
“According to the recommendation of shareholders about unfavorable stock-market conditions, the board had an extraordinary meeting and decided not to list this year,” the company said in a statement on its website late yesterday.
Vietnam’s benchmark VN Index has declined more than 24 percent from its Feb. 9 peak this year, a slump some investors consider a bear market, amid government efforts to contain Asia’s fastest inflation. The gauge dropped for a fourth day today, losing 1.3 percent to 400.12 at 10:24 a.m. local time.
Hanoi-based FPT Securities had planned to list 55 million shares on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange on Dec. 13 at initial prices of 20,000 dong to 23,000 dong, Chief Executive Officer Nguyen Diep Tung said Nov. 2. That would have valued the company at as much as 1.27 trillion dong ($60.5 million).
The brokerage reported net profit of 43.2 billion dong in the third quarter, compared with 29.2 billion dong in the same period last year, according to its website.
The company is partly owned by SBI Holdings Inc., a Japanese financial services provider, which bought a 20 percent stake earlier this year.
Consumer prices in Vietnam rose 21.59 percent in October from a year earlier, according to data released on Oct. 24 by the General Statistics Office in Hanoi, the fastest increase among 17 Asian economies tracked by Bloomberg. The inflation rate reached 23 percent in August, the most since 2008.
Tan Viet Securities Joint-Stock Company delayed a share listing originally planned for this year until 2012 because of the country’s stock market performance, magazine Dau Tu Chung Khoan reported in September, citing Nguyen Van Dung, the company’s general director.
bloomberg businessweek
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