Business Beat
While HCM City authorities are going ahead with their tough measures on outdoor advertising, they clarified last week that these would only affect new and renewed licences.To mutterings that the new regulations, scheduled to take effect on October 10, clash with the national advertising ordinance, city officials say that the law gives them carte blanche for bringing order to the mess that is outdoor advertising.
Advertisers call them draconian. They apprehend that 90 per cent of existing outdoor ads would be pronounced illegal and dismantled. Billboards, for instance, cannot be put on building facades or roofs; the city centre and roundabouts are out of bounds. Public transport too is beyond the pale, though the ordinance allows it. and to advertise lingerie and kids’ nappies, billboards will have to stick to copy – no more pictures.
However, as HCM City Chairman Le Thanh Hai clarified last week, only new and renewed licences stare down this barrel; existing advertisements can remain in place till their licences expire.
Clearly, the new efforts merely aim at restoring order to outdoor advertising, not send it packing. HCM City residents meanwhile are hopeful that authorities will end all manner of illegal advertising that makes their lives miserable – ads painted on their walls, noisy mobile vendors selling pesticides, and aggressive distribution of leaflets at intersections.
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Now is the best time for buying on Viet Nam’s stock market. Share prices have fallen to their lowest level and from here can only go one way – up. In September, they fell for 17 consecutive sessions and the VN-Index hit a record low of 179.93 points, for the first time, going below the psychological 180-point barrier. Just a year ago, the index, at 570 points, seemed poised to go through the roof.
Who is buying during this slump? According to the State Securities Commission, foreign investors. They have been buying in large quantities since the beginning of the year, while domestic investors, without steel nerves and deep pockets, have been falling over themselves to exit the market. Oddly, share price movements seem to have no relationship to the performance of the listed companies. Despite good results, prices have continued to plunge. Observers say that the market is moving on sentiment, and not facts and figures. and sentiments have been bearish because investors are frustrated with the interventions in the functioning of the bourse. Investors say that to rebuild confidence, its managers will need to make it clear that such interventions will cease, and that the use of common tools like short selling and buying on margin will be permitted. But who can tell? Perhaps we’ve entered an era of investors seeking also dividends, and not just capital gains, unlike in the market’s early days.
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Vietnamese companies have started to recruit the best executives in the market without fretting about the top wages they demand. Packages which include a monthly salary of US$5,000, quarterly bonuses, good housing, and chauffeur-driven cars, are no longer rare for top corporate positions. But local companies apparently still find it hard to hold on to these expensive executives, not because of the cost, but because, accustomed to working in a very different environment, they are not always happy in their new roles.
Top executives are mostly either former staff of foreign-invested companies or are foreign-trained. Many are not comfortable with the management at local companies. Therefore, to run things the way they’d prefer, the structure of the company often needs radical change, a costly and time-consuming process. In fact, most are burnt out before they reach the end of these reforms. Vietnamese companies are often run as family businesses where the owner has a direct say in everything. It’s hard for them to accept someone who runs "their" business in a different way and to give that person free rein. Other times, demands by the new executives are beyond the financial capacity of the companies.
There are snide suggestions that local companies, to tap the potential of high-class managers, need not only offer a good reward package, but also a new mindset for themselves: to be accepting of change.
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The HCM City Government is trying to attract the best and the brightest to spark off a new wave of economic development. Incentives, as in the private sector, include high salaries at not less than VND3.5 million a month, a fairly high income for the State sector, management positions, housing, schooling for children and residency permits. The desire is laudable but the approach needs to be more clearly defined.
Alongside incentives, the municipal Government should identify positions they want these people to fill. A detailed job description, with well-defined responsibilities and challenges, means more to many than merely a high salary.
VNS
