Vietnam leads Southeast Asia in IPO market

By Vu Minh   April 19, 2018 | 12:54 am PT
Vietnam leads Southeast Asia in IPO market
A woman rides a bicycle past the stock exchange center in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo by Reuters/Nguyen Thanh Cao
The country raised $6 billion from IPOs in 2017.

Vietnam is the busiest IPO market in Southeast Asia at the moment, and the country’s rising economy is paving the way for the process.

There have been no signs of caution in the boom of IPOs in Vietnam, Bloomberg said on Wednesday.

Vinhomes JSC, a residential unit under Vietnam's biggest developer Vingroup, is planning an initial equity offering (IEO) and a listing of its share on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange.

The current IEO record is held by Vincom Retail JSC, Vingroup’s shopping-mall operator, after it raised $708 million last October.

But that position is likely to be overtaken by Techcombank with its $922 million IPO.

Over the past year, Vietnam has taken the lead in Southeast Asia ahead of Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines by raising $6 billion from IPOs, according to Bloomberg data.

The country's economy is one of the reasons for this.

Vietnam’s economy grew 7.38 percent in the first quarter of this year, the highest rate in a decade, thanks to the industry and construction sectors.

It also expanded by 6.8 percent in 2017, establishing a ten-year record.

The benchmark VN-Index has risen around 17 percent since January, outpacing Asia’s main markets, and has more than doubled over the past two years, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.

The VN-Index, a capitalization-weighted index of all the companies listed on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange, closed at 1,138 on Tuesday.

The index closed at 1,120 on February 28, up a staggering 14 percent from the beginning of the year, which was the biggest gain worldwide.

On the last working day of 2017, it closed at a 10-year high of 984.24, earning Vietnam the nickname Asia’s “frontier market.”

 
 
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