Vietnam Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh urged banks to provide cheaper loans with longer terms to attract foreign investors to develop green power projects in the country, Bloomberg News reported. Vietnamese ministries also need to sit down with wind and solar energy investors to understand their difficulties and losses in order to find a “harmonious” pricing mechanism for both buyers and sellers, Chinh said at a Hanoi conference Sunday. Renewable energy companies on Mar.
Read more
Vietnam
Vietnam's central bank on Monday said it would raise its policy rates by 100 basis points, the second increase in a month, in what it said was an effort to head off inflation risks, maintain stability and protect its banking system, Reuters reported. Effective Tuesday, the refinancing rate will be increased to 6.0% and the discount rate to 4.5%, the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) said in a statement.
Read more
It was a jarring image for one of the world’s fastest growing economies: Scores of Vietnamese flooded branches of the nation’s fifth-largest bank to pull out their savings amid rumors the lender was tied to a real estate conglomerate under investigation for fraud, Bloomberg News reported. Vietnam’s central bank spent the last week calming markets and depositors while Saigon Commercial Bank raised interest rates and lured back customers. On Saturday, the regulator said it would place the privately-held lender under “special scrutiny” and directed four banks to help manage it.
Read more
While debt has been a problem for millennia, contemporary international institutions have focused on alternative dispute resolutions for commercial disputes for only decades, according to an analysis in mediate.com. according to an analysis in mediate.com. In the late ’90s many developing countries experienced financial distress. In 1999, the World Bank began to analyze the problem and in 2001developed the “Insolvency and Creditor Rights Standards” (ICR Standards). The focus was on judicial proceedings. The possibility of resorting to mediation was regarded as entirely residual.
Vietnam's gross domestic product (GDP) growth slowed to just 2.58 percent in 2021 as the effects of the pandemic hit the country's economy, marking a steep decline from the 7.02-percent growth recorded in 2019, Deutsche Presse reported. Vietnam's GDP actually grew by 5.64 percent in the first half of 2021, but the country's failure to contain COVID-19 in the second half of the year led to repeated lockdowns and factory closures that inflicted serious socio-economic damage, according to the report published by Vietnam's General Statistics Office.
Read more
Vietnam's slow reopening this past week was bittersweet for Stanley Furniture, which had been in COVID lockdown along with thousands of other manufacturers, from Netflix supplier ASRock to shoe giant Pou Chen. On the one hand, Stanley employees were glad to go back to making desks and drawers. On the other, their goods are stuck in storage because global shipping costs skyrocketed, Nikkei Asia reported. That is just one of many risks hanging over the fragile supply chain even after Ho Chi Minh City and surrounding provinces on Friday lifted a bruising pandemic shutdown.
Read more
After a bruising 18 months of the pandemic, this fall represented a fresh start for the apparel company Everlane. It was preparing to release a slew of new products, with September marking the beginning of an ambitious marketing campaign around its denim. Instead, Everlane has spent this month scrambling just to get jeans — along with other products like bags and shoes — out of Vietnam, where a surge in coronavirus cases has forced factories to either close or operate at severely reduced capacity with staff living in on-site bubbles, the New York Times reported.
Read more
Vietnam's growing dominance as a furniture exporter is at risk as trade authorities in the U.S., its biggest market, probe the country's timber industry and its ties to illegal logging abroad, Nikkei Asia reported. The sector has boomed in recent years, thanks in part to former U.S. President Donald Trump's trade war with China, which saw tariffs as high as 25% slapped on Chinese furniture exports. Vietnam, in fact, overtook China last year in furniture exports to the U.S., shipping $7.4 billion worth of the goods, compared with China's $7.3 billion, reported Vietnam News Agency.
Read more
Three Vietnamese banks have pledged to lend 4 trillion dong ($173.8 million) to Vietnam Airlines to help the troubled flag carrier weather the impact of the pandemic and avoid bankruptcy, state media reported on Monday, according to Reuters. Vietnam Maritime Commercial Joint Stock Bank, Saigon - Hanoi Commercial Joint Stock Bank and SeABank would make the interest-free loans this month and early next month, the Lao Dong newspaper cited the central bank as saying.
Read more
Southeast Asian low-cost carriers, a key growth engine for planemakers and leasing companies for a decade before the pandemic, are faltering financially as demand plunges, raising questions over whether they can replace and double their fleets, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Auditors for Malaysia's AirAsia Group Bhd and Vietnam's VietJet Aviation JSC are concerned about cashflows and funding, while Indonesia's Lion Air has put the brakes on a planned flotation.