Vietcombank takes big stride in international market

Hanoi (VNA) – The Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam (Vietcombank) has been named in the 17th annual Global 2000 – Forbes’ ranking of the World’s Largest Public Companies in 2019.

Ranked the 1,096th and with its market value hitting 10.9 billion USD, the bank took the lead among Vietnamese companies included in the list. The others are the Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BIDV), property and retail giant Vingroup and the Vietnam Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Industry and Trade (VietinBank).

Over the past five years, the Vietcombank’s market value increased nearly three times, as compared with 2015 when it embarked on the 2016-2020 restructuring period.

Companies on the 17th annual Global 2000 account for more than 40 trillion USD in annual revenue and upwards of 186 trillion USD in global assets. The rankings are based on a composite score of revenue, profits, assets and market value. 

Vietcombank, VietinBank and BIDV have been included in the rankings since 2016.

Forbes Vietnam recently announced Vietnam’s 50 top listed companies for 2019, which accounted for 63 percent of total market capitalisation on the Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi stock exchanges.

Vietcombank is the only representative of large-scale State credit institutions to be included in the list for seven consecutive years.

For three consecutive years, Vinamilk led the market in terms of profitability, but last year, Vietcombank surpassed the dairy company to become the champion in post-tax profit with growth rate of 60 percent.

The bank’s profit exceed 2 trillion VND (86 million USD), even higher than the combined number of VietinBank and BIDV.

With market capitalisation amounting to over 10 billion USD, Vietcombank has also surpassed Vinhomes, Vinamilk and PV Gas to become the largest in this regard.

In 2018, Vietcombank entered The Asian Banker magazine’s rankings of the 30 strongest banks in the Asia-Pacific region for the first time. The magazine has also repeatedly named the bank with the strongest balance sheet in Vietnam.

Last year, Vietcombank pulled its bad debt down to below 1 percent (0.97 percent) for the first time since its equitisation. Its return on average assets (ROAA) and return on average equity (ROAE) were 1.37 and 25.42 percent.

The bank opened its first overseas branch in Laos the same year. Of note, it has become the only Vietnamese bank to get the approval of the US Federal Reserve (FED) to open a representative office in the US.

Vietcombank is stepping up efforts to complete procedures for the opening of its first branch in Australia.

The bank set the target of raising its pre-tax profit to 1 billion USD by 2020.-VNA