Master Investor Show 2024

Overview

Master Investor Show 2024 featured a presentation from Charles Cade, Non-Executive Director of Vietnam Enterprise Investments Limited (VEIL), introducing Vietnam as an investment destination and VEIL as the principal route for UK investors to access it.

Key Discussion Points

• Vietnam’s economic transformation: How Vietnam moved from a centrally planned economy in the 1980s to a lower-middle-income, market-oriented economy following the 1994 lifting of the US trade embargo, alongside key country statistics including population, urbanisation, and demographics.
• Structural growth drivers: The “China plus one” supply chain shift bringing foreign direct investment into manufacturing, ongoing infrastructure investment, the emergence of a spending middle class, and rapid urbanisation.
• Manufacturing and technology investment: Vietnam’s growing role in electronics assembly (including Samsung) and its emerging position in the global semiconductor supply chain, alongside trade agreements with around 55 countries and a well-educated, digitally engaged workforce.
• The Vietnamese stock market: The structure and growth of the market, foreign ownership limits, the dominance of retail investors, and the case for eventual inclusion in FTSE and MSCI emerging market indices.
• Sector composition and valuations: The prominence of banks within the index, recovering corporate earnings, and valuations described as cheap on a price-to-earnings basis relative to history and to regional peers such as India.
• Routes to market access: A comparison of direct investing, open-ended funds, ETFs, and London-listed investment trusts, with VEIL presented as the longest-established and largest of the London-listed Vietnam funds.
• VEIL fund specifics: The fund’s history since 1995, its management by Dragon Capital’s 16-person sector-specialist research team, its largest holdings (including leading banks, Hoa Phat Group, FPT Group, and Mobile World Group), its wide discount to NAV, and the board’s ongoing share buyback programme.
• Risks: Bureaucracy, corruption (with reference to Vietnam’s Transparency International ranking), boom-bust cycles in the real estate sector, and Vietnam’s increasing correlation with global markets and US interest rates.

Information about Vietnam Enterprise Investments Limited can be found here.

Follow Vietnam Enterprise Investments Limited (VEIL) on LinkedIn for the latest fund updates.