While many businesses have a high demand for capital at the end of the year for business loans, workers’ salary payments, and bonuses, banks are not allowed to extend more credit to their customers; therefore, businesses have to struggle to find capital.
Vietnam could face many new challenges in 2023, although experts believe that despite adverse effects from the outside, the Vietnamese economy has remained rather resilient so far.
From the end of this year onwards, real estate businesses will face a worrisome period due to cash flow shortages as corporate bonds will begin to mature. This will be in sharp contrast to the enthusiasm with which these businesses raced with each other to issue bonds in the years 2019 until 2021.
About 15 commercial banks have just been allowed to expand their credit limit by 1 percent to 4 percent by the State Bank, but this time expansion has not satisfied the market's thirst for capital after a long wait.
The country’s economy is recovering positively after the Covid-19 pandemic, making the capital demand for production and business increase. However, businesses are hungry for capital while banks exhaust credit quotas.
From the beginning of August 2022, many more banks including commercial banks with state capital have raised the interest rate offered on savings accounts to attract extra cash.
According to the State Bank of Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City Branch, the credit growth in the city by the end of April is expected to increase seven percent over the end of last year, equaling an outstanding balance of over VND3 quadrillion (nearly US$132 trillion).
Facing the pressure of increasing prices of goods, many enterprises worry that lending interest rates will stay at a relatively high level in the coming time.
Bank credit increased robustly at 4.03 percent in the first quarter of 2022, 2.7 times higher than the same period last year. This is the highest growth rate in the past five years.
The State Bank of Vietnam has been directed by the Government for many years to reduce lending interest rates. In the current effort towards economic recovery and sustainable development, this will prove quite difficult as markets are currently strung between multiple bottlenecks.
Six new airports will be built in the next 10 years, raising the total number of airports in the country to 28, haft of which are international airports, according to a master plan on the development of airports in the 2021-2030 period with a vision to 2050 that has been submitted to the Government by the Ministry of Transport.
By the end of June this year, credit growth is estimated at 5.5-6 percent compared to the end of last year. With this growth rate, a representative of the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) said that the credit growth target of 12 percent would still be achieved by the end of this year. The SBV will closely monitor macroeconomic developments, the situation of the pandemic domestically and internationally to direct credit growth to focus on lending to the fields of production and business and contribute to promoting economic development.
Recently, the conditions for corporate bond issuance to the public have been tightened by the State. This is a move to reduce risks for investors, especially for individual investors, so the number of issued corporate bonds has also fallen sharply. However, in the context that deposit interest rates remain at a low level, many enterprises have issued corporate bonds with high-interest rates to attract capital.
In the first eight months of this year, it is estimated that the total amount of corporate bonds being offered was more than VND129 trillion and successful issuance rate was 90.8 percent, or nearly VND118 trillion. Of which, banks issued more than VND56 trillion worth of bonds, accounting for nearly half of total value of issued bonds in the market.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien yesterday had a meeting with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on the occasion of his visit to Vietnam for promoting cooperation between the two countries.
Since the beginning of this year, total foreign capital pumped into Vietnamese market has nearly reached US$15 billion, an increase of 81 percent over the same period last year, with the highest investment from China followed by South Korea and Singapore.
According to SSI Securities Corporation in its recently-released report on the financial and monetary market in March, as credit growth of banking sector was merely at 2.28 percent by the end of March, much lower than a growth of 3.56 percent in the same period last year, pressure to boost credit growth will be passed to the second quarter, leading to high demand for capital mobilization with interest rates unlikely to decline.
In the first two months of this year, the exchange rates at commercial banks have not seen much fluctuation but reference exchange rate has been continuously adjusted by the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV).
