Aquatic firm set to be removed from the stock market

HÀ NỘI — Aquatic exporter Hùng Vương Group will cancel its listing on August 8 due to violations of information disclosure rules, the Hồ Chí Minh Stock Exchange (HoSE) has said.

Aquatic firm Hùng Vương Group's listing on HoSE will be cancelled on August 5. — Photo

The southern market regulator will delete more than 227 million shares of Hùng Vương to protect the benefits of investors in accordance with the Law on Securities.

Hùng Vương’s shares were suspended on May 15 as the company kept violating the rules on information disclosure after it had been strictly controlled since March 2018.

The company has not released its financial reports for the 2019 financial year, which lasted from October 1, 2018 to September 30, 2019, and for the first quarter of 2020 despite repeated reminders from HoSE.

Hùng Vương in early June said in a filing to HoSE that it had to delay financial reporting because of the lack of accountants and some missing statistics.

Several accountants quit their jobs and moved to new companies on worries about lower income amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which made the firm unable to gather financial data on time, the company said.

In addition, letters of debt validation had not been collected by the end of the fourth quarter of 2019 from foreign partners, so the data was not sufficient enough to be reported, it said.

Hùng Vương had committed to complete compiling the two reports by June 15, but it has failed to do so.

HoSE has flagged three warnings to the company about delaying the publication of its 2020 first-quarter financial report.

The company was once among top aquatic firms. In 2016, Hùng Vương’’s total revenue was more than VNĐ18 trillion (US$786 million).

However, failures in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) using financial leverage put the company under debt pressure and performance has declined from one year to another.

In the 2019 financial year, Hùng Vương posted an annual drop of nearly 50 per cent in total revenue, which was VNĐ4.1 trillion.

The company recorded a post-tax loss of VNĐ1.07 trillion in 2019 while earning a post-tax profit of VNĐ1.5 trillion in the previous year.

Notably, total debts in the financial year of 2019 increased by 10.4 per cent on-year to VNĐ7.1 trillion while owner’s equity capital dipped 57.2 per cent on-year to VNĐ916 billion.

Hùng Vương shares are valued at VNĐ5,400 apiece since May 14.