The sharp falls of the stock prices have made businesses understand the complexity of the finance market and prompted them to sell stocks to restructure their investment portfolios.

Several years ago, when the stock price kept rising and brought fat profits to investors, investing in stocks became “in fashion”. Businesses rushed to pour their money into the stock market, even though they did not have deep knowledge about the finance market. But nowadays, when the stock price keeps falling down, they feel tired of financial investments and try to sell stocks away.

Shares sold out

The Refrigeration Engineering Enterprise (REE) has registered to sell all the 42 million STB shares in the period from January 6 to March 6, 2012. The total value of the shares is 650 billion dong, which is double the total trading value of the trading session of the HCM City Stock Exchange on January 4.

The amount of shares is equal to 3.92 percent of the shares of one of the best joint stock banks in Vietnam – Sacombank.

If it can sell shares at 16,000 dong per share (the price of the share on January 4, 2012), this would be a success for REE, because the enterprise bought shares before at attractive prices.
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Nevertheless, the decision of REE to sell all the shares it holds in Sacombank has stirred the public, because the decision was released at the time when the stock market was gloomy with very few successful transactions. Meanwhile, REE, together with Dragon Capital, were once considered the “loyal” shareholders of Sacombank.

Prior to that, on the last days of 2011, the Bien Hoa Sugar Company (BHS) also registered to sell all the 1.44 million STB shares from January 5, 2012 to March 5, 2012, while the Ninh Hoa Sugar Company registered the sale of 5 million STB. Sacomreal (SCR) also continuously registered the sale of STB shares. Most recently, it announced the sale of 17.3 million shares from December 23, 2011, to February 23, 2012.

Not only STB, some other bank shares have also been put on sale. VNT, for example, a big shareholder of Ocean Group (OGC), registered to sell 33.27 million OGC shares, or 13.3 percent of the chartered capital of OGC, from December 26, 2011, to February 26, 2012.

In other business fields, Sacom has decided to sell 9.2 million CSG shares, Vinaline 180,011 GMD shares, Thu Duc Housing 940,000 CII shares.

The movement of withdrawing capital from other businesses has raised the worries about the negative impacts on the stock market.

Stock sellers need capital?

Explaining its decision to withdraw capital from Sacombank, REE said that it is trying to restructure the investment portfolio.

Several months before, after withdrawing capital from RNG investment fund capital, Nguyen Quang Quyen, Investment Director of REE, once told the press that REE was following a strategy of withdrawing from finance investment deals to focus on the business fields which are the advantages of REE. The corporation, for example, would concentrate on providing M&E services to big construction works, or developing Reetech products.

With the recent moves, it is obvious that REE has been trying to scale down its finance investment and focus on the core business field.

Meanwhile, Bien Hoa Sugar Company has also said that it sells stocks to take back capital to have more capital for its production plan.

Analysts have commented that the sale of stocks in masses at this moment shows that businesses are thirsty for capital. This explains why they have to sell shares right now, when the stock prices are low, instead of waiting some more time to obtain better prices.

Source: VNN