Only 78.37 million out of 130.6 million offered Vinamilk shares were sold at an auction last week. The price of VND144,000 per share was 11 percent higher than the market price at the auction.

The two Vinamilk share buyers were two foreign investors, who are also existing shareholders of Vinamilk and want to increase their ownership ratio in the company.

The poor sales of Vinamilk shares has surprised analysts, who believed that Vinamilk shares were attractive thanks to its high capitalization value and sky-high profits.

The Vietnam Association of Financial Investors’s (VAFI) deputy chair Nguyen Hoang Hai believes that Vinamilk shares did not attract many investors because SCIC sold the shares in small lots. Strategic investors were not interested in the shares because they did not have opportunities to buy shares in large quantities to obtain the right to manage the company.

While the State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC) can sell only 60 percent of Vinamilk shares, the nation’s leading dairy producer, domestic investors are queuing up to buy shares of Sabeco, increasing the brewery’s share prices.

An analyst said that VND144,000 per share was a high price for investors, more than the market price.

With the price level, Sabeco’s capitalization value has reached VND126.781 trillion, or $5.6 billion, or nearly 9 percent of the capitalization value of the whole market.


Meanwhile, since it made debut on December 6, Sabeco has seen its share prices increase. After seven trading sessions, Sabeco share prices hit VND197,700 December 14, a two-fold increase over the December 6 price.

Despite the high price (higher than any other shares), investors still sought Sabeco shares, but the volume of Sabeco shares on offer was small.

The analyst said that with the price of nearly VND200,000, the P/E index has reached 35, a high level compared with other brewery companies. This means that Sabeco shares have become too expensive compared with Vinamilk shares or shares of other companies.

However, the high price of Sabeco shares is not that surprising. Habeco, another brewer, also saw its share prices increasing on the UpCom market. 

Investors are rushing to buy breweries’ shares because Vietnam is considered one of the fastest growing markets in the world. 

A report showed that in 2015, beer consumption in Vietnam increased by 10 percent compared with the year before and by 41 percent compared with 2010. 

In 2015, Vietnam consumed 3.4 billion liters of beer, according to Nielsen. Vietnam is the biggest market in South East Asia, third largest market in Asia and among 25 biggest markets in the world.

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Mai Thanh