Viet Nam has attracted a lot of attention from foreign investors thanks to sustained economic growth in recent years and growth stories of its private sector and public companies.

However, the nation also remains among the few frontier markets in the MSCI category, which include Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. This has hindered Viet Nam from drawing investment from the big guys like global financial institutions and asset management companies that typically have strategies in place to allocate their portfolio in global, regional or emerging markets.

Foreign investors can now have opportunities to increase their holdings up to 100 percent of voting shares in a public company in Viet Nam, when they start the process to change their Foreign Ownership Limits ("FOL") as allowed by current regulations. In addition to loosening the FOL, a number of other actions are being taken by related Government agencies for having the MSCI upgrade Viet Nam's stock market to the Emerging Markets (EM) category.

How are Vietnamese Government agencies dealing with this process? What are main constraints to loosening the FOL in Vietnamese public companies? And when can we expect Viet Nam's Stock Market to be upgraded to EM status?

To address these concerns, StoxPlus has co-operated with the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange (HOSE) to conduct a comprehensive review of FOL for listed companies that are part of the VN100 Index.

We have also conducted a survey to obtain opinions and other feedback from more than 100 representatives of foreign institutional investors including large asset management firms that haven't got any exposure in Viet Nam and are awaiting the change.

Along with MSCI representatives, Government officials and other speakers, HOSE and StoxPlus are pleased to present at a conference key findings from our joint review of Foreign Ownership Limits on firms listed on HOSE, as well results of the Foreign Institutional Investor Survey.

The conference has received technical support from the State Securities Commission, IFC, Nikkei Inc., QUICK Corp and Indochine Counsel.

This is the second annual conference organized by StoxPlus and HOSE with support from Nikkei Inc. and QUICK Corp. of Japan. It has attracted 250 participants including representatives of investment and financial institutions from Viet Nam, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Thailand, Malaysia, US and EU.

The conference will take place on 4 November, 2016 at the HOSE Exchange Tower, 16 Vo Van Kiet Street, District 1, HCM City.