Careers with the highest incomes in VN — Talk Vietnam

Careers with the highest incomes in VN

VietNamNet Bridge – Pilots, air traffic controllers, and oil and gas officers have some of the highest incomes in Vietnam.

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A report released recently by Vietnam Airlines showed that in 2013, the pilots working for the air carrier received VND74.8 million a month. The figure was VND4.5 million lower than 2012 and VND6.7 million than 2013.

However, the salary is still considered “sky high” if compared with other careers, especially civil servants who receive less than VND10 million a month.

While pilots are believed to be workers who have the highest income, air stewards hold the most “admired” job, while stewards are called “sinecurists” because they are not required to have higher education, but still can earn VND18-19 million a month.

Becoming pilots and stewards is the dream of many women under 30 and men under 40.

Labor experts pointed out that the salary paid by air carriers is not the only source of income for stewards. They can also make money with the legal trading of goods across border gates.

The incomes of oil and gas companies’ officers are also high. In 2013, a worker at PetroVietnam, the national oil and gas group, received VND16.2 million a month, the highest pay level among the 17 state-owned economic groups and general corporations.

Air traffic controllers rank third in the list of admired jobs. Kienthuc.net quoted sources as saying that an air traffic controller can earn VND15 million a month.

However, like pilots and air stewards, air traffic controllers are listed as a “dangerous career” because their operations can affect the lives of many people.

Human resource officers, technical and financial service providers have also seen their incomes increase rapidly in recent years.

In HCM City, sales and marketing are the best-paid jobs. Salary Guide 2014, a report of Adecco, showed that human resource development in Vietnam has potential for higher incomes in the future.

In general, the salaries paid to chief officers are much higher than that paid to the normal workers in the same business field.

A report from the Vietnam National Tourism Administration (VNAT) showed that a foreign CEO working for high-end hotels in Vietnam can receive $10,000-15,000 a month, or VND210-320 million. It is estimated that there are some 5,000 3-5-star hotels in Vietnam.

In the banking sector, the CEOs of the top 10 joint-stock banks can earn up to $1 million a year on average, or VND21 billion. The CEOs of some big banks earn VND4.8-7 billion a year, while other high-ranking bankers earn VND2 billion a year on average.

Chi Mai

Careers with the highest incomes in VN — Talk Vietnam

Vietnam looking at weak banks bad debts

Vietnam orders public list of weak banks as bad debts mount 

Last Updated: Wednesday, August 01, 2012 01:00:00

 

Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung ordered a public list of weak banks and details of lenders’ non-performing loans as the government seeks to tackle bad debt that’s undermining the banking system and hurting businesses.

The central bank is drafting detailed measures to check bad debt, Nguyen Thi Hong, head of monetary policy at the State Bank of Vietnam, said at a briefing in Hanoi on July 31. The monetary authority needs to “quickly restructure banks’ debt, reduce bad debt by comprehensive measures and restructure weak banks” to minimize any potential risks to the system, according to the order posted on the government website yesterday.

Vietnam has struggled with stagnant lending and high inflation that has crimped corporate growth and domestic demand. The monetary authority has cut interest rates for five straight months this year and ordered lenders to reduce rates on loans to companies, while the government has pledged to speed up restructuring of weak commercial lenders and non-performing loans. Bad debts rose to 4.47 percent of total lending as of May 31 from 3.07 percent at end-2011, according to the central bank.

“The high bad-debt ratio at banks is a worrying problem,” Nguyen Duc Hai, Ho Chi Minh City-based portfolio manager at Manulife Asset Management, said by phone on July 30. “Rising bad debt has become a large burden on banks and hindered them from giving more loans.”

The benchmark VN Index on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange slipped 0.4 percent as of 10:35 a.m. local time. Bank stocks fell, with Joint-Stock Commercial Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam, the nation’s largest-listed company and second- biggest listed lender by market cap, sliding 1.4 percent, and Saigon-Hanoi Commercial Joint-Stock Bank losing as much as 2.3 percent. The dong eased 0.1 percent to 20,880 against the dollar.

Significantly understated

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State Bank of Vietnam Governor Nguyen Van Binh said in April bad debt may be “much higher” than the reported figures at some banks. Bad debt continues to be on an “uptrend,” Vu Duc Dam, chairman of the government office, said on July 31.

Vietnam’s government said earlier this year it may establish a company to buy bad debt from banks to strengthen their balance sheets and enable them to step up lending. The aim is to cut the bad-debt ratio at state-owned banks to below 3 percent by 2015, according to the March 2 statement.

Non-performing loans are “significantly understated” and could be three or four times higher than the official estimates, Fitch Ratings said in a March report.

Vietnam’s lending grew 0.93 percent at the end of July, compared to the end of 2011, the government said in a release at yesterday’s briefing. Consumer prices may fall in August compared to July on lower food and fuel prices, Dam said.

Loan demand

While easing inflation has given the central bank room to cut interest rates, lenders have faced lower demand for loans as the economy grew 4.66 percent in the three months to June from a year earlier. Deputy Prime Minister Vu Van Ninh has said full-year expansion may fall below the government’s 6 percent target.

More than 30,300 companies closed permanently or suspended operations in the first seven months of the year, up 6.4 percent from a year earlier, according to a statement on the government website on July 31. A purchasing managers’ index for Vietnam fell to 43.6 last month from 46.6 in June, HSBC Holdings Plc and Markit Economics said today. A number above 50 indicates growth.

The central bank has said it aims to boost lending growth to as much as 10 percent in the second half of the year from 0.76 percent in the first six months.

Dong deposit rates at commercial lenders could drop to below 8 percent if inflation eases to less than 7 percent at year-end, Binh said July 29, even as the monetary authority has resisted calls from businesses to cut borrowing costs further.

Rates on some preferential loans may drop to below 10 percent in 2013 if deposit rates fall, Binh said.

A Private-Banking Rush to Tap Asia’s Wealth

"In the exclusive world of private banking, a gravitational shift of resources toward Asia is well under way. A shift in profits may take longer to follow.

A number of banks are either acquiring or setting up businesses to manage private wealth in an effort to tap the rising population of multimillionaires, particularly in China and India. Singaporean lender Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. tripled its private-banking assets when it bought ING Groep’s Asian private-banking operations last year. Macquarie Group started its regional wealth-management unit in 2008. In Japan, Barclays Wealth is in talks to set up a wealth-management venture with Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, which invested £500 million, around $997 million at the time but about $750 million today, into Barclays in June 2008.

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Others have been shifting their global or senior executives here. J.P. Morgan Chase’s international private bank chief, Douglas Wurth, moved in February to Hong Kong from New York to take a job heading all private-banking markets outside North America. Deepak Sharma, in Singapore, became the global chairman of Citigroup’s private bank last year, while another Singapore banker, V. Anantha-Nageswaran, became chief investment officer of Swiss private bank Julius Baer.

Accompanying the build-up, after a year of layoffs, is a burst of hiring and poaching. Citigroup is looking to hire 20 to 30 private bankers for China and India this year; BSI, a Swiss private bank that is part of Italian insurer Generali Group, hired 70 private bankers from RBS Coutts Bank in Singapore last year; and Barclays Wealth has hired more than a dozen senior private bankers from market leader UBS in the past six months to focus on India.

UBS, which lost more than $100 billion in client funds in the financial crisis globally and has had a series of private bankers defect to rivals, is itself on a hiring spree. “Asia Pacific is the fastest-growing region for all of UBS’s businesses and we expect to make around 400 hires…throughout front, back, and middle offices of the wealth-management business across the region this year,” said Kathryn Shih, head of UBS Global Wealth Management, Asia Pacific.

Still, winning business from Asian clients could be a challenge. During the financial crisis, many lost big sums on investments in structured products and hedge funds.

Anuj Khanna, head of North Asia private banking at Credit Suisse Group, says that even though the group cut its staff last year, it increased hires at the managing-director level. One benefit, he said: New assets generated in Asia by newly hired relationship managers in 2009 tripled from 2007.

Bankers say clients are being more cautious about hedge funds and stocks. “As there’s a lot of uncertainty still in the markets, our ultra-high-net worth clients are now looking at private-investment opportunities, distressed assets or private equity, rather than stocks or bonds,” Khanna said.

Simply reaching some of the best customers will remain a challenge in India and China, where licenses to bank for the wealthy are hard to obtain. Some of that business naturally goes to Singapore and Hong Kong, away from the prying eyes of domestic tax authorities. But studies have shown that Asia’s wealthy put only 10% to 20% of their assets overseas; the rest stays at home.

A handful of foreign banks may have an edge in these markets. UBS has a license to trade securities for clients in some key Chinese cities, and HSBC Holdings’s retail branches dot India, giving it reach. But even for them, access is nascent, at best.

The rush to bank Asia’s rich may be on, but there is a long way to go."

Vietnam to let banks set rates on consumer loans

HANOI, Jan 24 (Reuters) - Vietnam will allow banks to establish interest rates on consumer loans on a negotiable basis from next month, the central bank said.
The new rule, effective from Feb. 1, will allow banks to set interest rates on consumer loans outside the ceiling rate, which is equivalent to 150 percent of the base rate regulated by the central bank, bankers said.
"Banks are allowed to apply negotiable interest rates for consumer loans and credit card loans according to the central bank's lending regulation, the supply and demand of funds and borrowers' creditworthiness," the central bank said in a statement seen on Saturday.
On Friday, the central bank said it would also cut the benchmark base rate to 7 percent from Feb. 1, effectively lowering the ceiling rates to 10.5 percent, from 12.75 percent now as it moved to boost corporate borrowing to stave off an economic slowdown. (Reporting by Nguyen Nhat Lam

US financial storm passing over Vietnam

The world finance market seems to have had a weight lifted after the US FED slashed the interest rate to 0.25%. Vietnam’s finance market is also believed to have survived the most difficult period. However, experts say the market will still bear impacts of the US’s storm.

Banks try to avoid storm

Experts say the market will still bear impacts of the US’s storm.
Dr. Nguyen Dac Hung, from the State Bank of Vietnam, said that besides State Bank’s deposits, 80% of which are being put in central banks, Vietnam’s commercial banks have been depositing at high credit-ranking foreign banks, which spells that Vietnam’s money remains safe.

However, in order to prevent risks, Vietnam’s commercial banks have been trying to restructure their deposits at foreign banks, having shifted deposits to Hong Kong or Singapore.

By the end of October 2008, Vietcombank had withdrawn 40% of its deposits from the US and other places to put in the State Bank of Vietnam and some other banks in regional countries. It has also closed some Nestro accounts in foreign countries

Vietnam’s foreign currency reserves have reached $23 billion. The US currently has bank branches in Vietnam, which are still operating normally. The banks are also still operating in the US, with none of them having been dissolved, swallowed or sold.

Export, overseas remittance, FDI will be influenced

According to the General Statistics Office, Vietnam’s export turnover has been decreasing continuously over the last few months.

The export turnover in November 2008 reached $4.8 billion, representing a 4.8% decrease over October 2008. The total export turnover in the first 11 months of 2008 is estimated to reach $58.54 billion, an increase of 34% over the same period last year. However, if not considering price increases of five export items (crude oil, rice, coal, rubber, coffee), the export turnover growth rate would be only 19%.

Due to the lower demand and payment capability of the importers, the orders from the US, EU and Japan for apparel, pepper, cashew nuts and woodwork have decreased by 20-30%.

General Director of a import-export company complained that it is now very difficult to seek new export contracts.
Regarding the FDI, in the first 11 months of the year, some 900 projects were licensed. If counting on the capital of the operational projects, which plan to increase capital, the total registered capital in these 11 months reached over $60 billion, or three times higher than that of the same period of 2007. However, this just demonstrates the increase of registered capital, while it also shows the decrease in the number of projects and implemented capital, just $10.050 billion, which does not come in accordance with the considerable increase of the registered capital.

Explaining this, economists have said that a considerable proportion of the capital that foreign investors use in Vietnam comes from loans they borrow from foreign banks and from banks operational in Vietnam. With the current situation regarding US and foreign banks’ liquidity, foreign investors will find it more challenging to borrow money from banks.

Hung, from the State Bank, said that according to a newly-released survey, of $60.097 billion, European and US investors just account for 5%, while 95% belong to Japanese and Asian investors, a region that has not been influenced much by the financial crisis.

Regarding the expected volume of $8 billion overseas remittance, Dr. Ha Quang Dao, from the HCM City Banking University, said that this is the forecast given before the financial crisis broke out. Dao believes that the overseas remittance in late-2008 and early-2009 will not reach the expected level, as the remittance mainly comes from the US and the EU, the regions that have been severely affected by the crisis.

(Source: Tien phong)

Rupee shoots up by 60 paise vs US dollar

Mumbai, Dec 10, 2008 (Asia Pulse Data Source via COMTEX) -- In tandem with the upswing in equity markets, the rupee, after Monday's brief pause, today shot up by 60 paise to end at a nearly 4-week high of 48.98/49.00 against the dollar on expectations of more capital inflows.
In fairly active trade at the Interbank Foreign Exchange (Forex) market, the local unit opened sharply higher at 49.18/20 a dollar from the previous close of 49.58/59.
Initially, it touched the day's low of 49.35 on some dollar buying by oil refiners.
But a spurt in the Sensex after the government unveiled a multi-crore stimulus package for the economy and dollar selling by banks on expectations of a further fall in the greenback helped the rupee to rally smartly, a forex dealer said.
Some stability in most of the Asian stock markets after the announcement of the stimulus packages by many developed as well as developing countries might have brought some relief in the market.
As a result, the Sensex flared up by another 492 points, or 5.37 per cent, while Asian indices ended the day with a gain between 2.0 per cent and 5.6 per cent.
Foreign funds were also buyers in the past few days and looking at the stability in the share markets, they expected to invest more at the current lower levels in the coming days, which also boosted the rupee sentiment.
The rupee breached the 49 level and touched a high of 48.89 before concluding the day at 48.98/49.00, a rise of 1.21 per cent.
Meanwhile, the RBI fixed the reference rate for the dollar at Rs 49.12 and for the single European currency at Rs 63.52. The rupee premiums on the forward dollar improved further on sustained paying pressure from banks and corporates.
The benchmark six-month forward dollar premium payable in May ended at 79-82 paise, higher from 71-74 paise on Monday and the far-forwards maturing in November also finished up at 111-114 paise from 100-103 paise, previously.
In cross-currency trade, the rupee recovered sharply against the pound sterling and the euro and remained firm against the Japanese yen.
The domestic currency surged against the pound sterling to end the day at Rs 72.44/46 from the previous close of Rs 73.92/94 and also recouped against the single European currency to Rs 63.34/36 per euro from the last close of Rs 63.84/86 per euro.
The rupee, however, improved further against the Japanese yen to Rs 52.78/80 per 100 yen from Monday's close of Rs 53.11/13 per 100 yen.

Central bank Vietnam cuts key rate to damp impact of global crisis

The State Bank of Vietnam Monday cut the benchmark interest rate to 13 percent to limit the “negative impact” of a possible global recession on the economy.
The central bank reduced the key rate from 14 percent, effective from today, according to a statement on the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV)’s website. Vietnam’s benchmark rates, which had been raised thrice since February, are still the highest in Asia, along with Pakistan’s, as the government tries to slow inflation from 27.9 percent.
Commercial banks use the base rate to calculate their own rates for lending and deposits. It had been at 14 percent since June.
“If they are doing this now, they must feel very comfortable that inflation is under control,” said Alain Cany, the Ho Chi Minh City-based chairman of the European Chamber of Commerce (EuroCham) in Vietnam. “With inflation looking to be more under control, and given the world situation, I don’t think this damages the central bank’s credibility.”
Lower interest rates will make it easier for companies to borrow money, bolstering company profits and helping the government to meet its growth target. India Monday cut its key rate for the first time since 2004 to protect Asia’s third-largest economy from the global financial crisis.
Nguyen Dai Lai, Deputy Director of the SBV’s Banking Development Strategy Department, told Thanh Nien Daily the central bank had cut the official interest rate in a bid to “increase the liquidity of commercial banks and help them reduce their lending interest rates in order to create more favorable conditions for firms to access capital.”
Vietnamese policy makers also lowered the refinancing rate to 14 percent from 15 percent, and the discount rate to 12 percent from 13 percent, according to the statement. The central bank doubled the interest rate it pays on compulsory reserves for banks to 10 percent.
Global crisis
“Although the Vietnamese economy isn’t yet showing signs of a recession, we have seen some impact of the deepening global financial crisis,” said Nguyen Thi Kim Thanh, a deputy director of the bank’s Monetary Policy Department in Hanoi. “It’s now time for the central bank to do something to prevent the economy from slowing further.”
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