Vietnamese shares were mixed on Monday morning amid weak trading liquidity, dragged down by large-cap companies.

The benchmark VN-Index on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange inched down 0.21 per cent to close at 973.35 points.

The VN-Index posted a very slight increase of 0.01 per cent last week.

More than 68 million shares were traded on the southern market, worth VND1.55 trillion (US$66.6 million).

On the Ha Noi Stock Exchange, the HNX-Index gained 0.23 per cent to end at 106.10 points.

The northern market index was up a total of 1.42 per cent last week.

Only 13.8 million shares were traded on the northern bourse, worth VND213.5 billion.

Large-cap companies weighed on the market in the first session of the week.

The VN30-Index, which tracks the performance of the 30 largest stocks by market capitalisation and trading liquidity, dropped 0.16 per cent to end at 873.61 points.

Seventeen of the 30 stocks in the VN30 basket declined while nine increased.

Among the decliners were food and beverage firm Masan (MSN), property developers Vinhomes (VHM), Novaland (NVL) and Vingroup (VIC) and steel producer Hoa Phat (HPG).

Food and beverage, real estate and building material production were the three worst-performing sectors on Monday morning, data on vietstock.vn showed.

The three sector indices all shed between 0.7 per cent and 1 per cent.

The afternoon trading session starts at 1pm. — VNS