The record for Vietnam’s biggest ever IPO changed hands twice in two weeks in April. In a market that is finally delivering on its promise after disappointing investors for many years, first Techcombank and then Vinhomes launched successful, cornerstone-dominated deals.
Vietnam Technological and Commercial Joint Stock Bank, to give it its full name, raised $922 million before real estate company Vinhomes set out to raise $1.35 billion in a deal expected to price on May 7. Each also became the largest IPO (or in Vinhomes case, what it calls an IEO, for initial equity offering) in southeast Asia so far this year.
Techcombank, the only one of the two to have concluded its bookbuild when Euromoney went to press, was arguably more significant for its investor mix than its size.
Nguyen Le Quoc |
The leads set out to build a big cornerstone tranche of guaranteed allocations and ended up putting just under $700 million of it in the tranche, with buyers including Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, Capital Group, Fidelity and local name Dragon Capital, itself thought to be investing partly on behalf of Norwegian sovereign wealth fund Norges Bank.