HANOI: Vietnamese shares were mixed yesterday while higher global oil prices helped boost local energy companies. At the end of the trading session, the VN Index on the HCM Stock Exchange rose 0.2 per cent to close at 563.27 points. Meanwhile, the Ha Noi Stock Exchange’s HNX Index dropped 0.2 per cent to finish at 76.64 points, extending the northern market’s losses to a fourth day in a row.
Energy firms led gainers as a slight increase in West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude buoyed energy companies. WTI crude yesterday traded at US$44.24 a barrel, an increase of 0.5 per cent from $44 a barrel on Monday.
Petrovietnam Gas Corp (GAS) was up 0.6 per cent, Petrovietnam Drilling & Well Services (PVD) rose 0.3 per cent, Petrovietnam Coating Co (PVB) gained 1.4 per cent and Drilling Mud Corp (PVC) increased by 3.1 per cent.
A 6.7 percent increase in the Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BID) also helped lift the benchmark VN Index. BID is now the fourth largest company on the Vietnamese securities market with a capitalisation of VND80 trillion ($3.56 billion).
Yesterday, foreign investors bought total 6.7 million BID shares, equal to 73.6 per cent of total BID shares that were traded on the market, for total value of VND190.6 billion ($8.5 million) – nearly 10 per cent of total trading value on both bourses.
BID also topped the market trading with 9.1 million shares being traded, followed by property developer FLC Group (FLC) with nearly 3.8 million shares. However, BID was the only bank stock that made gains among nine banks on Viet Nam’s stock market. Among these banks, Sacombank (STB) was down 3.7 per cent, Vietcombank (VCB) fell 1.2 per cent and Military Bank (MBB) lost 3.2 per cent.
“The financial sector will likely remain quiet as it has been for the past several days because the firms in this sector are waiting for this week’s meeting of the US Federal Reserve to decide whether it will raise the interest rate”, brokerage Sai Gon-Ha Noi Securities reported. Two local bourses yesterday traded more than 114 million shares with trading value of VND1.95 trillion ($86.7 million), an increase of 11.4 per cent from Monday.
