When Vietnam made one of its infrequent visits to the debt capital markets recently, it was rewarded with one of Asia’s most oversubscribed bond issues ever. Standard Chartered was joint lead manager and sole ratings adviser to the bond issue and switch/tender offer, continuing a relationship with the country that, one way or another, goes back more than 100 years.
It was 1904 when Standard Chartered opened its first branch in Vietnam’s largest city, then called Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. After 1975 and the end of the Vietnam War – or the American War, as they call it in Vietnam – there was no place in the reunified one-party communist state for western banks.