A steel mill of Hoa Phat Group. The business shares lost 2.9 per cent on Monday. — Photo courtesy of Hoa Phat Group JSC

Viet Nam’s benchmark VN-Index failed to beat the 1,000 points again amid lack of supportive corporate news and large-cap stocks declining after strong gains last week.

The VN-Index on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange fell 0.47 per cent to close Monday at 985.75 points.

The VN-Index gained total 0.32 per cent last week.

More than 207.5 million shares were traded on the southern bourse, worth VND5.28 trillion (US$227.4 million).

The southern market was shadowed by negative sentiment as the three major indices classifying stocks by market capitalisation and trading liquidity dropped by 0.51-0.97 per cent.

The large-cap VN30-Index lost 0.57 per cent with 20 of the 30 largest stocks in the basket losing ground.

Among decliners were tech group FPT Corp (FPT), retailer Mobile World (MWG), Vietcombank (VCB), Techcombank (TCB) and steel producer Hoa Phat (HPG).

Technology, retail and banking were also the three worst performing sectors, whose indices were down between 1.3 per cent and 2.5 per cent, data on vietstock.vn showed.

Those large-cap stocks were the main driving factors for the market growth last week, for example, FPT, Mobile World and Techcombank shares increased between 2.2 per cent and 3.3 per cent in total.

According to Thanh Cong Securities Co (TCSC), investors were still cautious with the market conditions at the moment as they were willing to exit the market as soon as possible.

The Vietnamese stock market is currently in lack of supporting corporate news, which will make the VN-Index continue to swing up and down in the next trading days, TCSC said.

Among the few large-cap companies that saw shares increase on Monday, Vinamilk (VNM) was boosted by the Ministry of Finance’s statement to keep the most-favoured-nation (MFN) tariffs on imported milk products unchanged to support domestic dairy firms.

The US Dairy Export Council and the American Chamber of Commerce Vietnam (AmCham) has recently suggested Viet Nam cut tariffs on dairy imports to boost US exports to Viet Nam.

Vinamilk shares soared 2 per cent on Monday.

According to Ngo Quoc Hung, senior analyst at MB Securities Co’s market strategy department, individual stocks with their own stories will be the centre of attention, especially because investors are not wealthy enough to make risky purchases.

The VN-Index may struggle between 980 and 985 points in the next few days and the sectors and stocks will be differentiated depending on the supportive news, TCSC forecast.

On the Ha Noi Stock Exchange, the HNX-Index rose 0.23 per cent to end at 104.38 points.

The northern market index last week advanced total 1.9 per cent on a weekly basis.

More than 31.3 million shares were traded on the northern bourse, worth VND355 billion. — VNS