“In Vietnam, the stock market is changing day by day,” Nguyen Dung, a manager at a foreign-run hotel and part-time MBA student who had never owned shares until recently, told the FT. “If anyone has the correct information, they can get easy money.
Last week, impressed by the spectacular rise of Vietnam’s stock market, he invested $650 in an informal pool with 30 of his MBA classmates. The MBA students have agreed to pool information and tips and invest in a murky — and unregulated — informal market for shares in partially-privatised state-owned companies.
After watching the formal stock market’s main index soar by 249 per cent over the last 13 months, Vietnam’s emerging middle class is in the throws of stock market mania and students, civil servants and state enterprise managers with cash to spare are all rushing to buy shares and dreaming of windfall profits.
The recent bull-run on the formal exchange, with 107 listed companies, has been propelled partly by foreign investors, eager for exposure to one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies.
But for Vietnamese investors there is even greater euphoria in the market for the unlisted shares in hundreds of partially-privatised former state enterprises that may, or may not, list on the formal exchange one day. A recent auction put a $170m value on a copper cable company that reported $1.1m in profits last year.
But the craze is creating a few headaches. As tales emerge of local investors buying shares in defunct banks, Vietnamese authorities are fretting that many citizens — rather than getting rich — may on the verge of seeing their savings evaporate. Meanwhile, Vietnamese companies in an array of sectors appear to be using surplus cash to punt on the market instead of investing in their core activities. And authorities are also struggling to get stock market-obsessed civil servants to focus on their day jobs.
