Transparency critical for SOEs’ efficiency enhancement: seminar

At the event on improving SOE's efficiency: information transparency, governance renovation held by the Government’s e-portal ahead of the meeting of the Prime Minister with SOEs to take place later this month, participants said despite accounting for less than 1 percent of the total number of businesses, SOEs are operating in the country’s key fields and contributes 30% of the GDP. The economic sector also generates jobs for labourers, thus ensuring social welfare.

However, the efficiency of SOEs is yet to match with their huge resources.

Dang Quyet Tien, Director of the Ministry of Finance’s Corporate Finance Department, said that many SOEs have still failed to improve governance and operation efficiency after being privatised.

An estimate by the Steering Committee for Enterprise Innovation and Development showed that 92% of SOEs were equitised over the past two decades but only 10%of the State capital was replaced by private capital.

Economic expert Luu Bich Ho said that transparency was a common problem for SOEs.

He said that transparency and good governance were critical for SOEs in the condition of rapid international integration and requirements for compliance with international rules.

SOEs need to change their thinking and working styles to create healthy businesses for efficient and sustainable development, he underscored.

Phung Van Hung, permanent member of the National Assembly’s Economic Committee, said that after equitisation, many enterprises did not want to list on stock exchanges and did not want to publicise their operation results.

Hung said that it was necessary to push for the listing of SOEs which had already been equitised.

Tien agreed, adding that when listed on stock exchanges, the supervision of investors would force SOEs to improve governance and transparency following market practice.

He pointed out that there were about 700 SOEs which had been equitised but not listed. Of them, nearly 200 were planning to list and 300 were transforming into public companies while the listings of the rest were stagnant.

Public disclosure of information on finance and operation of SOEs is a top priority, Tien said, adding that improved transparency will help enterprises to raise capital at lower costs that banking loans.

He said that foreign investors focused more on governance efficiency rather than assets such as land in making investment decisions.

He said that only with transparent information, could solutions be found for these projects.