(2 February 2007 – Vietnam) Another international bank has entered Vietnam with Deutsche Bank announcing it will take a 20 percent stake in Vietnam’s Hanoi Building Bank (Habubank) for an undisclosed sum.Habubank is the sixth largest partly privatised commercial bank in Vietnam with assets at the end of 2006 of about 12 trillion dong (US$748 million) and a pre-tax profit of 248 billion dong.
Vietnam’s economy is growing at about eight percent a year, attracting international lenders such as HSBC, Citigroup, ANZ and Standard Chartered.
Now a member of the World Trade Organisation, the government in Hanoi is expected to increase the amount of equity foreign institutions can take in domestic banks from 10 to 20 percent in the near future.