What does the American billionaire want to invest in Vietnam?

The stock market is one of the areas that American billionaires want to invest in Vietnam.

Having just returned from a trip to call for US businesses to invest in Vietnam, Mr. Pham Viet Muon, former Deputy Head of the Government Office, member of the organizing committee of the investment promotion conference held in the US from July 1 to 5, shared a lot of interesting information.

Mr. Muon said that Minister of Finance Dinh Tien Dung has just chaired an investment promotion conference in New York (USA) with the theme "My Vietnam - Your investment destination". The conference attracted more than 160 representatives of funds, banks, leading US and world-class financial institutions with total assets of thousands of billions of USD that have been and are interested in investing in Vietnam. In the dialogue session alone, the hall was packed with US investors.

Four sectors attracting American investors

According to him, there are four areas in Vietnam that top US investors are interested in, including equitization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the stock market, government bonds, and business establishment.

Mr. Pham Viet Muon and billionaire Phillip A Falcone, Chairman of Habinger Fund - the fund that invested in the Grand project - Ho Tram, Xuyen Moc, Ba Ria-Vung Tau. - (Photo: TL)

Mr. Muon emphasized that currently, foreign investors in general and American investors in particular have not participated much in the restructuring process of SOEs through equitization. The reason is that American investors are large investors, while the equitization process of SOEs up to this point has mainly taken place in enterprises with limited scale, small and medium. American investors are interested in large enterprises.

Referring to Vietnam's potential capital market, Mr. Muon commented that American investors are interested in the Vietnamese stock market due to its stable economic growth and the prospect of Vietnam returning to a high growth rate of over 7%/year. Especially the change in the Government's thinking when it recently officially issued Decree 60/2015 on room expansion, allowing foreign investors to own 100% of capital in enterprises, except for enterprises in conditional business lines. (Previously, we limited the foreign ownership ratio to 30%, then increased to 49% and now it is 100% for many industries).

Explaining the reason why many American corporations have come to Vietnam to explore investment opportunities in the past but the number of enterprises investing in our country is not much, Mr. Muon said that the time was not ripe for American investors to enter Vietnam. Moreover, large projects often did not appear right from the beginning when Vietnam opened its doors to attract foreign investment. That did not attract American investors, including many very large investors and billionaires of the world.

“But now the situation is different. We are equitizing large corporations and state-owned enterprises, and now American investors are coming in. Moreover, the fields we are calling for investment in are quite broad, including electricity, oil and gas, coal, and aviation,” said Mr. Muon.

He also said that currently, US investment in Vietnam is quite large, but compared to investment from Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, it is still low. The reason is that US investors are still expecting Vietnam's business environment to improve significantly in the process of operation and innovation, especially after Vietnam signed the Vietnam-US Free Trade Agreement, and is moving towards signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The TPP is expected to promote trade between Vietnam and other countries, opening up great opportunities for the Vietnamese economy as well as investors interested in Vietnam.

Attractive destination for capital flows

American billionaire Wibur L. Ross, who has assets of over 3 billion USD, ranked 200th in the US and 600th globally, acknowledged at the investment promotion conference that Vietnam is an attractive destination for investment capital, especially investment in the stock market and equitized state-owned enterprises. The 78-year-old billionaire also believes that Vietnam's export-oriented industries and real estate will develop strongly and are worth investing in.

According to Mr. Wibur L. Ross, American investors are interested in efforts to reform the economy, including tax policy reform and room expansion for foreign investors, which have been strongly implemented by the Vietnamese Government.

The US is the largest economic, trade and investment partner in Vietnam. As of February 2015, the US had 729 direct investment projects in Vietnam with a registered capital of 11 billion USD. Many large US financial groups have participated in the Vietnamese capital market./.

According to Vov.vn