Maritime Bank: Growth in All Aspects

2009 is a challenging year for the domestic and regional economies as global financial crisis wreaked on businesses and banks. However, with a more than 18 year experience, Maritime had a year of successful business. The crisis did not impact much on our bank’s operations, given our positive business results and growths in all aspects.

In 2009, the profit of Maritime Bank reached VND1,084 billion while the total assets valued at nearly VND65 trillion as of December 31. In 2010, the lender expects at VND1,000 billion of profit, VND100 trillion of assets and VND4,000 billion of chartered capital.

In my opinion, the secret to escape hardships is, first and foremost, the right and complete awareness of difficulties before introducing response measures and actions. Banks need to build a comprehensive risk prevention mechanism, especially market risks. In addition, banks have to focus on diversifying activities, not only taking care of credit but also increasing service revenues - the risk will be lower. Besides, lenders can expand relationships with partners to diversify products and services.

 

Maritime Bank, in addition to its focus on good risk management and liquidity, always coordinates with customers, especially traditional customers to withstand the crisis. Moreover, we attach much importance to customer approach and care activities in order to introduce new products and improve services for corporate and personal customers.

 

Our efforts have been repaid. In fact, Maritime Bank made better-than-estimated profit in the first months of 2009 when impacts of the crisis strengthened. We managed to keep the stable growth until the end of 2009.

I totally agree with this point of view. In the course of construction and development, we have encountered numerous difficulties, but with our effort, we managed to live through to show off our capacity.

 

We will continue to diversify our products and services, improve service quality, and implement flexible lending programmes, pay more attention to smallholding corporate customers to introduce appropriate policies.

 

Regarding corporate customers, in the upcoming time, we will continue to provide short-term, medium-term and long-term credits in a timely manner for businesses to expand production and business. Aside from traditional credit products, Maritime Bank will design products for specific groups of customers and supply capital for production and business activities through other channels like factoring and corporate bonds. We also promote package banking services for corporate customers involving importing and exporting and pay more attention to smallholding businesses.

I think, following the recovery momentum in 2009, Vietnam’s economy will continue to growth, fuelled by the domestic market expansion, flexible exchange rate to spur export and reduce trade deficit. However, I do not exclude the possibility that inflation may return.

 

The economic growth is forecast at 6.5 % next year, export will rise 6 %, and consumer price index (CPI) will be capped at 7 %. In 2010, Vietnam will focus on accelerating the solid recovery, pay attention to growth quality, maintain macroeconomic stability and prevent the return of high inflation.