Petro Vietnam-Finance Co (PVFC) on November 24 sold one trillion VND (55.6 million USD) worth of its corporate bonds to a group of four Vietnamese banks.

A signing ceremony to seal the deal with the Military Bank, Ocean Bank, Techcombank and VIB Bank was held on November 24 at the company’s new nine-story headquarters in Hanoi .

The sale is the first phase in a total issue of five trillion VND worth of bonds planned by PVFC between now and the end of the year, according to Nguyen Viet Ha, director of the PVFC investment department.

PVFC, with assets of 60.9 trillion VND, earned 4.4 trillion VND (237.8 million VND) in revenues in the first ten months of this year, surpassing its target for the year by 14 percent. The company posted a profit of 808 billion VND (43.6 million USD), an amount twice the target set for all of 2009.

The company now estimates earnings for entire year of five trillion VND and a net profit of one trillion VND by the end of this year.

PVFC is an affiliate of the national oil and gas group Petro Vietnam , which also reported on November 24 10-month earnings of 217.59 trillion VND (11.92 billion USD) in the period.

“Revenue decreased by 12 percent from the same period last year,” said Petro Vietnam deputy director Le Minh Hong. “However, this still reflected great efforts of the group because crude oil prices fell dramatically, by 50 percent. The positive performance stemmed from high revenues from services, which notched up 70 trillion VND, and accounted for 30 percent of our total revenue.”

Petro Vietnam contributed about 72.5 trillion VND into the State Budget during the period.

The group also reported production of over 14 million tonnes of crude oil, 6.5 billion cu.m of natural gas, 619,000 tonnes of fertiliser and 6.8 billion Kwh of power during the period./.