After experiencing a period of decline in scale in 2023, associated with changes in legal regulations to improve the market, the corporate bond market had a relatively gloomy start in the first half of 2024, but became more and more active towards the end of the year.
The factor with a prominent impact in 2024 is the expiration of Decree 08/2023/ND-CP and the re-emergence of Decree 65/2022/ND-CP, specifically in the criteria for determining professional individual investors and credit rating requirements.
Notably, bond issuance activities of real estate enterprises have become active again in late 2024 and early 2025.
The recent bond issuance of Newco Investment and Development Joint Stock Company has attracted attention in the corporate bond market.
This company issued 3 bonds with a total value of VND 6,900 billion on December 19, 2024. The issuance interest rate is 9%/year, with Techcom Securities Joint Stock Company (TCBS) as the depository.
Notably, the financial report for the third quarter of 2024 of Techcom Securities Joint Stock Company (TCBS) shows that at the end of September 2024, TCBS is investing more than VND 1,000 billion in Newco, equivalent to owning 9.9% of the capital of this real estate enterprise.
Vinhomes Joint Stock Company (code VHM) has just successfully issued VND4,000 billion in private bonds with a term of 36 months. These bonds are non-convertible, have an interest rate of 12%/year, are not accompanied by warrants and are secured by assets.
Vingroup Corporation (parent company) will use assets to secure the bond obligations issued by Vinhomes. Since the beginning of 2024, Vinhomes has mobilized 9 individual corporate bond lots, with a total issuance value of VND 20,500 billion.
Nam Long Investment Corporation has successfully issued a bond lot of 1,000 billion VND. These are non-convertible bonds, without warrants and secured with a face value of 100 million VND/bond. The bonds have a term of 3 years, with an interest rate of 10.11%/year for the first 4 periods.
In addition, there are many bond issuance deals with a scale of 500-1,000 billion VND by many other real estate businesses.
According to statistics, in December 2024, the real estate group issued nearly 12,000 billion VND in bonds, accounting for 35% of the total issuance volume in the whole market.
According to VBMA's report, in 2025, it is estimated that there will be about VND 216,670 billion of corporate bonds maturing, of which the majority are real estate bonds, with VND 120,640 billion, accounting for 55.6%.
The pressure of bond maturity accompanied by the risk of late payment of principal and interest to investors still exists, especially for weak issuers in the real estate sector.
However, the positive point is that the real estate market has shown signs of recovery in 2024, after the three regulatory laws take effect, some remaining problems such as implementing commercial housing projects on non-residential land, granting certificates for condotels... may be resolved in 2025.
With an improved business environment, real estate businesses in general are expected to have better debt repayment capacity and reduce the rate of late payment of principal and interest on bonds in the new year.
