Vietnam agri firm lands $100 mln trade facility from foreign lenders

TTC AgriS, a leading agribusiness firm in Vietnam, has obtained a $100 million trade facility from foreign lenders, adding to a $40 million finance facility acquired in June.

The Ho Chi Minh City-headquartered listed company signed a deal for the latest finance facility Thursday with nine Taiwanese lenders led by First Commercial Bank, Taiwan’s third-largest bank.

The three-year syndicated loan is an unsecured facility in which First Commercial Bank will serve as the mandated lead arranger and bookrunner

Amid the prolonged credit crunch experienced in Vietnam, the unsecured funding shows that TTC AgriS has won the trust of credit suppliers, the company said.

In June, TTC AgriS had signed another deal for a $40 million commodity-backed warehouse finance facility co-arranged by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and leading Japanese lender Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC). IFC is the World Bank Group’s private-sector investment arm.

The facility, to be processed under the IFC’s Global Warehouse Finance Program (GWFP), will help boost the warehouse financing market in Vietnam, which is still at a nascent stage, the lenders said.

“The funding will further increase the competitiveness of the country’s agribusiness value chain, generating much-needed jobs and improving people’s livelihoods,” Thomas Jacobs, IFC country manager for Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, said in a July 16 statement on the IFC-SMBC financing partnership.

Dang Huynh Uc My, vice chairwoman of TTC AgriS, said: “The facility will allow TTC AgriS to take loans using raw materials as collateral, which will give us increased working capital to be more flexible to procure, store, distribute materials and goods, leading to a more efficient system.”

The GWFP aimed to increase working capital financing available to agricultural producers or traders by leveraging their commodities in storage. To date, GWFP has supported over $10 billion in global trade, IFC said.

TTC AgriS, earlier known as TTC Sugar, is a member of Vietnamese private conglomerate TTC Group led by tycoon Dang Van Thanh. It says it is pioneering agricultural transition towards zero emissions discharge, increasing products and organic material area, and reaching net-zero emissions by 2035.

Establishing its position as a comprehensive agriculture solutions provider from farm to fork, TTC AgriS has transformed its business from purely agricultural production to an integrated agro-economic business model of production, import, export, trade and service with a multinational development orientation, the company said.