The restructuring of the Vietnam economy in the period from 2011 to 2015 and orienting toward 2020 is focusing on three main issues: restructuring the system of credit institutions, state-owned company and public investment.
Credit institutions: The focus task of restructuring the system of credit institutions is to strengthen the liquidity, fix bad debts and gradually increase the capacity of organization and management of such credit institutions.
Over the past two years, since its launch, nine banks have been sorted, re-organized by ways of merger or restructuring. Typically, SCB, Ficombank and Tin Nghia Bank merged into Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB); Habubank merged into SHB; Western Bank merged with PVFC to found PVcombank; Trustbank restructured intoVietnam Construction Bank (VNBC).
Meanwhile, bad debt settlement process is only able to shift bad debts from banks to the Vietnam Asset Management Company (VAMC). Up to now, VAMC has been acquiring approximately USD 2 billion of bad debts, but it is only able to handle less than 1% of the acquired bad debts through bad debts trading.
State-owned enterprise: The process of restructuring Vietnam state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has been stepped up a notch by the government in 2014 with drastic measures, such as privatization and capital withdrawal from non-core business. The goal that Prime Minister has launched earlier this year was to privatize over 400 enterprises within the period between 2014 and 2015. The results have not been positive, when only 15 SOEs conducted initial public offering (IPO) in the first quarter of this year.
Public investment: Regarding the upcoming Investment Law, the greatest expectation lies in decentralization in management, assignation of powers and responsibilities of the authority decision maker.