The annual shareholder meeting of Maritime Bank (Photo: Maritime Bank)Hanoi (VNA) – The Vietnam Maritime Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Maritime Bank) hasfailed to get approval from shareholders to trade its shares on the stockexchanges.
At the bank’sannual shareholder meeting held on May 26, 97 percent of shareholdersdisapproved of the proposal put forward by the bank’s board to list shares onone of the three major stock exchanges.
The threeexchanges in question are the HCM Stock Exchange (HoSE), Hanoi Stock Exchange(HNX) and Unlisted Public Company Market (UPCoM).
The banksubmitted its application for share listing to the Vietnam SecuritiesDepository (VSD) in January 2017 and had to provide additional documents tocomply with VSD requirements. Maritime Bank reapplied to VSD in early April.
Shares ofMaritime Bank have been traded on the Over-The-Counter (OTC) market since June26, 2009 under code MSB. The bank’s share price has fallen from a startinglevel of 19,200 VND (85 US cents) per share to around 4,000 VND per share.
According to thebank’s management board, the price of bank shares has remained low due to thedownward trend of the economy in general and the banking sector in particular.
In 2017, MaritimeBank targets to increase its total assets, mobilised capital and lending by 15 percent,17 percent and 14 percent to 106.6 trillion VND (4.74 billion USD), 72.3trillion VND and 51.75 trillion VND, respectively.
The bank alsoplans to raise its pre-tax profit slightly to 165 billion VND from last year’sfigure of 164 billion VND. Maritime Bank plans to make dividend payouts at arate of 5 percent for 2017 and zero for 2016.
Tran Xuan Quang,vice chairman of the bank’s standing management board, said at the meeting thatMaritime Bank would continue provisioning its bad debts in order to make surethe bank’s operations are secure.
Maritime Bankexpects its pre-provision profit for 2017 will reach 2.2 trillion VND and itprojects to handle 7 trillion VND worth of bad debts and maintain a bad debtratio of below 3 percent by the end of 2017. — VNA
VNA
