Vietnam’s government has asked seven state-owned companies to “immediately sell” U.S. dollars to banks in order to ease a dollar shortage and meet currency demands, according to a statement on the government’s Web site.
Seven companies including Vietnam Oil & Gas Group, Vietnam National Coal-Mineral Industries Group, and Vietnam Airlines Corp. were asked to sell the currency to the nation’s lenders amid “unbalanced dollar supply and demand” in the foreign- currency market, according to the statement.
“This is an important guidance of the government to handle the situation that major collecting foreign-currency sources such as export, remittances, foreign investment and tourism are declining while demands for currency is still very high,” the government said in the statement.
Vietnam’s central bank has been struggling to ease a dollar shortage that has extended the gap between official and black- market exchange rates. That’s meant companies have been forced to pay more on the black market for the U.S. dollars they need to purchase raw materials, machines and other foreign goods.
Policy makers have devalued the reference rate for trading and narrowed the daily trading band for the nation’s currency the dong against the U.S. dollar.
Soaring demand, especially from small-sized companies, plus dollar speculation has made the foreign-currency market “more tense,” the government said in the statement.
The official exchange rate of the Vietnamese dong as of late yesterday was 18,475 a dollar, according to Bloomberg data. This compares with a black-market rate of about 19,530 per dollar, according to a telephone information service run by state-owned Vietnam Post & Telecommunications.
