Only 4 enterprises in Vietnam licensed for providing credit rating services

Vietnam has only four enterprises recognized by the Ministry of Finance as eligible for delivering credit rating services as of August, said the ministry.

They are FiinRatings (formerly FiinGroup), VIS Rating, and S&I Ratings, all based in Hanoi; and Ho Chi Minh City-headquartered Saigon Ratings.

The ministry stated that the issuance of a certificate of eligibility for credit rating services in Vietnam is based on the government’s Decree 88/2014/ND-CP dated September 26, 2014 on credit rating services.

According to the decree, enterprises providing credit rating services must be granted a certificate of eligibility for credit rating services by the Ministry of Finance. Those that do not register to provide credit rating services are not allowed to use the phrase “credit rating” or other phrases with the connotation of “credit rating” in their names.

Credit rating is not a bottleneck hindering the development of Vietnam's corporate bond market. Rather, it is the key to making the market transparent, thereby enhancing investor confidence, said Phung Xuan Minh, chairman of Saigon Ratings, the first credit rating agency in the country.

On January 1, 2024, regulations requiring credit rating results for some bonds took effect. In addition to the VND11 trillion ($432.73 million) worth of bonds issued via public offerings, all with credit ratings, about 4.2% of the remaining VND110 trillion ($4.38 billion) of private placement bonds were also rated, he said.

The size of the Vietnamese corporate bond market is currently quite modest, at just 12% of GDP as of December 2023, stated broker VietinBank Securities, citing data from the Hanoi Stock Exchange and the General Statistics Office. The corresponding figures are 54.3% in Malaysia, 34.3% in Singapore, and 25.5% in Thailand.

Vietnam has targeted to increase the ratio to at least 20% of GDP by 2025.

In the first half of 2024, the corporate bond market remained stable with many successful issuances by enterprises. At the end of Q2, there were 1,097 bond codes of 293 companies with a registered transaction value of about VND784.3 trillion ($31.28 billion).

In H1, 41 enterprises issued private placement corporate bonds for VND110.2 trillion ($4.4 billion), of which credit institutions accounted for 63.2%, and real estate developers 28.6%. Among buyers, credit institutions made up 53.5%, securities companies 21.9%, and individual investors 5.2%.