Bearing adverse impacts from Covid-19, many enterprises have had to cut their wage funds to cut costs.

The finance reports of public companies show that two enterprises had labor costs of over VND10 trillion in 2019, or before the epidemic broke out. They were Vingroup and FPT.

As the corporation with the largest scale in the stock market, and operating in many business fields, it is not a surprise that Vingroup spent VND16.5 trillion on the labor force.

The figure included a considerable amount spent on the workers of Vincommerce system, which was transferred to Masan Group on the last days of 2019.

After the deal, about 30,000 workers of Vincommerce shifted to Masan, while the number of Vingroup’s workers fell from 65,300 in late 2018 to 51,000 in 2019.

FPT, the largest Vietnamese IT group, ranks second with the wage fund of VND10.3 trillion. At the end of 2019, the group had 29,000 workers, an increase of 1,000 over the year before.

Commercial banks, which make fat profit, are always generous in paying workers. Using high numbers of workers, banks hold the next positions in the list of the enterprises with the largest wage funds.

They are BIDV (VND9.7 trillion), VietinBank (VND9.5 trillion), Vietcombank (VND8.9 trillion) and VP Bank (VND7.3 trillion).

For the enterprises which specialize in providing services such as FPT, Viettel Post and banks, labor costs are the major expense item which may account for half or 2/3 of total direct costs.

For the enterprises which specialize in providing services such as FPT, Viettel Post and banks, labor costs are the major expense item which may account for half or 2/3 of total direct costs.

The non-bank enterprises which also have high labor costs include Vietnam Airlines (VND9.6 trillion), The Gioi Di Dong (hi-tech product distributor – VND7.9 trillion), Petrolimex (petroleum distributor), Vinatex (textile and garment), ACV (airport management) and Thaco (automobile manufacturer).

The Gioi Di Dong (Mobile World) is the listed company with the second largest number of workers in the stock market with 57,600 workers, an increase of 17,000 workers compared with late 2018.

The enterprise with highest number of workers is the Vietnam Rubber Group (VRG), 85,000, did not report their labor cost. Vietjet (air carrier) and Masan (consumer goods manufacturer) are also believed to have high labor costs, but have not reported the exact figures.

There are two names in the top 10 that caused a surprise to analysts – Viettel Construction (VND2.886 trillion) and Viettel Post (VND2.852 trillion), which far exceeded other enterprises such as Vinamilk, Hoa Phat Group and Sabeco, though their scale is smaller.

CafeF estimates that with 10,000 workers (the numbers of workers of the two companies were not shown in finance reports), the average spending on each worker was VND20-25 million a month.

Thanh Mai 

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