Vietnam's Oricombank 2007 profit soars 63 pct

HANOI, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Vietnam's Phuong Dong Commercial Bank, 10 percent owned by France's BNP Paribas (BNPP.PA), said on Wednesday it made a gross profit of 232 billion dong ($14.4 million) last year, a rise of 63.3 percent from 2006.

The Ho Chi Minh City-based unlisted bank, also known as Oricombank, said in a statement its loans reached 7.56 trillion dong at the end of last year, up 62 percent from a year earlier, and deposits jumped 81 percent to 9.8 trillion dong.

BNP Paribas, the euro zone's second-biggest bank by market capitalisation, bought a 10-percent stake in Oricombank last year, helping boost the bank's registered capital to 1.11 trillion dong from 1 trillion dong earlier, the statement said.

Oricombank said its assets jumped 82.4 percent to 11.75 trillion dong in the year.

Vietnam's central bank aims to limit growth in bank loans to 30 percent in 2008 after a jump of 37.8 percent last year, the official Hanoi Moi (New Hanoi) newspaper reported on Wednesday [nHAN133490].

Last year, Saigon Beer Alcohol Beverage Corp (Sabeco), Vietnam's largest brewer, also bought a 5-percent stake in Oricombank.

Sabeco said it would raise at least $557 million from selling 128,257,000 shares, or 20 percent of its shares, in an initial public offering on Jan. 28, making it the largest firm to sell shares to the public since last month's auction by Vietcombank.

While Sabeco's IPO will go ahead this month, the government could delay the IPOs of Hanoi Beer Alcohol Beverage Corp and state-run Incombank to avoid a bad impact on the markets from a share glut, state media quoted a market regulator on Wednesday as saying. ($1=16,108 dong) (Reporting by Ho Binh Minh; Editing by Quentin Bryar)