Southern Bank to open gold trading floor

Southern Commercial Joint Stock Bank, 10% owned by Singapore's United Overseas Bank (UOBH), said on Thursday it planned to take a more active role in gold trading from next month.

The Ho Chi Minh City-based unlisted bank would open a gold trading floor on Sept. 4 in the city, it said in a statement, without giving further details.

The trading floor run by Southern Bank would be the third after the Saigon Gold Trading Floor operated by Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank (ACB) and another similar facility opened by partly private bank Viet A on Aug. 11.

As the State Bank of Vietnam raised its three main interest rates three times this year to help control double-digit inflation, Vietnamese banks saw their profit generated purely from lending activities decline.

They have been expanding to new areas, including gold trading after many stock investors fled one of the world's worst-performing markets this year to seek higher returns.

Vietnam's main exchange, the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange, has so far this year lost nearly 50 percent of its 23-percent gain last year.

Sacombank (code STB) and Dong A Bank, both based in Ho Chi Minh City, planned to open their gold trading arms pending approval by the central bank, the Planning and Investment Ministry-run Dau Tu Chung Khoan (Securities Investment) newspaper said.

Gold prices rose more than 3% in Viet Nam on Wednesday, prompting the central bank to warn domestic investors of the risks of investing at a time of heavy speculation. (Reuters)