Government to sell its shares in Vietnam's largest brewer

By Dang Khoa July 1, 2020 | 10:17 pm PT

Men drink Sabeco's Saigon Beer in a restaurant in Hanoi. Photo by Reuters/Kham.

The government plans to sell its 36 percent stake in the country’s largest brewer, Sabeco, this year.

The Saigon Beer Alcohol Beverage Corp (Sabeco) is one of 139 enterprises in a new list in which the government's stakes will be sold by sovereign fund State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC).

The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) has been instructed to transfer the government’s stakes in these enterprises to the SCIC by August 31.

The government had sold a 53.59 percent stake in Sabeco to ThaiBev for over $5 billion in 2017.

The news puts paid to speculative claims made by some media outlets in early June that MoIT was seeking to reacquire Sabeco shares from ThaiBev due to "unexpected pandemic effects."

At the end of 2019 the maker of Saigon Beer had assets estimated at VND26.96 trillion ($1.2 billion) and owner's equity of VND20.07 trillion ($870 million).

Sabeco recently scaled down its revenue target for this year by 37 percent to VND23.8 trillion ($1 billion) and post-tax profit target by 39 percent to VND3.2 trillion ($138 million), the lowest in six years.