BNP Paribas divests entire stake from the Orient Commercial Bank

By Minh An - Jan 04, 2018 | 12:33 AM GMT+7

TheLEADERAccording to Orient Commercial Bank (OCB), BNP Paribas has sold all 74.7 million shares in OCB and is no longer a shareholder.

BNP Paribas divests entire stake from the Orient Commercial Bank
A transaction office of OCB.

BNP Paribas purchased a 10 per cent stake in OCB in 2007, then increased to 20 per cent in 2011. After OCB conducted the private placement in early 2016 to increase its charter capital to VND4 trillion (US$176.4 million), BNP Paribas’s shareholding declined to around 18.6 per cent.

Recently OCB has increased its charter capital to VND5 trillion (US$220.5 million), of which VND800 billion (US$35.3 million) was spent by five individual investors to acquire a 16.6 per cent stake in OCB, reducing BNP Paribas’s shareholding to 15 per cent.

In October 2017, VinaCapital's Vietnam Opportunity Fund (VOF) announced that it would invest US$11 million to hold a 5 per cent stake in OCB. VOF's representative said it was a rare chance to invest in a bank with high growth regarding loans and profits, run by a competent team with a clear expansion strategy.

OCB, a small and medium private bank in the banking industry, was established in 1996. By September 2017, OCB had the total assets of over VND70 trillion (US$3.08 billion), of which over 46.1 trillion (US$2.03 billion) was lent to customers.

OCB is the first bank in Vietnam to announce its completion of Basel II standards while 10 other banks, which are requested to pilot Basel II by the State Bank of Vietnam, have not revealed the results yet.

From January to September 2017, OCB achieved an after-tax profit of VND788 billion (US$34.7 million), a 200 per cent year-on-year increase and exceeding its 2017 target.

On December 29, 2017 Vietcombank auctioned nearly 19 million shares in OCB at the starting price of VND13,000 (US$0.57) each. However, on December 27, 2017 only four organizations and 54 individuals registered to purchase a total of 13.1 million shares, equivalent to about 70 per cent of the shares auctioned.