Banking & Finance

The moves of management bodies to purge Vietnam’s corporate bond market still had many feeling pessimistic, but the Fiin Group has affirmed these helped reduce volumes while boosting quality, with a good impact on the real estate market seen and little effect felt on credit quality.

Two months after VAT reductions were introduced on February 1, businesses are still confused about thousands of goods and services that appear to be ineligible. Ahead of a proposal to cut the VAT rate from 10 per cent to 8 per cent in all fields, the General Department of Taxation said many industries were unaffected by the pandemic, such as information technology, e-commerce, banking and finance, and real estate, so some sectors will be excluded from reductions.

Total State budget revenue in Ho Chi Minh City in the first quarter of 2022 reached more than VND121 trillion ($5.3 billion), up 9.4 per cent year-on-year, of which revenue related to real estate and crude oil contributed significantly. State budget expenditure totaled more than VND9.3 trillion ($406.7 million), down 33.8 per cent.

The State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) has directed credit institutions and foreign bank branches to continue strictly controlling financing in fields at risk or affected by Covid-19, such as real estate, build-transfer (BT) and build-operate-transfer (BOT) traffic projects, corporate bonds, and securities.

Vietnam’s stock market set a new record in February, with 271,000 new accounts opened. As of the end of March, the number of individual investor accounts totaled nearly 5 million. Vietnam therefore reached a milestone of 5 per cent of its population joining the stock market.

In the face of acts of manipulation, fraud, and deceiving investors in recent years, the Ministry of Finance (MoF) has affirmed its determination to purify the financial market by strengthening management, supervision, inspection, and examination to regulate the activities of the stock market and the corporate bond market.