Weekly Market Round-Up: Feb 17, 2020

Yuanta Vietnam Weekly Market Round-Up — Feb 17, 2020

Issue 2 of the Yuanta Vietnam weekly market wrap, a Monday morning summary of the prior week’s market activity. The week ending Feb 14 saw little love for the market overall, with average daily turnover of components of the three main indexes declining by 21% WoW. But breadth was skewed positively, with VNIndex components comprising 211 gainers and 143 losers during the week.

Weekly Index Performance

• VNINDEX: 937 (-0.4% WoW / -2.4% YTD / -4.6% YoY)
• HNINDEX: 110 (+6.2% WoW / +7.1% MoM / +3.4% YoY)
• UPCOM Index: 56 (+1.4% WoW / -0.2% MoM / +1.9% YoY)
• Average daily turnover: US$138 mn (-22% WoW)
• Foreign investors net sold US$4.0 million of HOSE-listed stocks.
• VND:USD rate: 23,245 (-6bps WoW, -31bps YTD, -21bps YoY) 

Sector leaders included banks and IT (both up +2.4% WoW), whereas property (-1.4%) and construction (-1.7%) declined. As always, the individual stocks were a mixed bag however. For example, VPB (BUY) was a standout gainer among the banks whereas HDB (-4.5%) went the opposite way.

On the banks, we downgraded BID to SELL last week largely on valuations after the stock returned 54% since his initiation. Please see Page 3 of this note for recent research links.

The coronavirus remains the key issue for Vietnam macro and markets. However, the EU Parliament also ratified the EU-Vietnam FTA last week. We believe that trade liberalization is a positive, but considerations of increased competition in the dairy industry might be behind VNM’s (Not rated) recent share price weakness (-3.3% WoW and -8.5% YTD). VNM will hold its 4Q19 call on Wed, Feb 19.