Vietcombank says H1 2008 profit hits $121 mln

HANOI, July 18 (Reuters) - Vietcombank, Vietnam's largest partly private lender, made a profit of 2 trillion dong ($121 million) in the first half of this year, its chief executive said, even though the banking sector struggles with liquidity.

"Over the past six months, despite facing many difficulties, Vietcombank still runs normal operation, develops well with high efficiency," Nguyen Phuoc Thanh of the Hanoi-based partly private bank wrote in an article published on Friday.

Thanh did not say if the profit figure was gross or net, and gave no details of the difficulties, but the article appeared in the ruling Communist Party-owned Nhan Dan (People) newspaper on the day Vietcombank announced its lending rate cuts.

Vietcombank said it was reducing interest rates on Vietnamese dong and dollar loans from Friday to help boost the country's economic competitiveness [ID:nHAN228413].

Vietcombank's profit for the first half is similar to the bank's net profit for the whole of 2007, when loans jumped 44.2 percent to 95.5 trillion dong and total assets rose 14 percent to 196.12 trillion dong.

Last December Vietcombank became the first state-run bank to conduct its initial public offering, raising $652 million from the sale of 6.5 percent of its total shares. It had initially planned a domestic listing in June.

But last month Vietcombank's Chairman Nguyen Hoa Binh said the listing would take place in the third quarter.

Vietcombank has projected lending growth to slow to 30 percent this year, in line with the central bank's target for the whole banking industry as it moves to tighten money supply to control double-digit inflation.

The central bank has said loans in the first half of this year were 20 percent higher than in the same period last year. It gave no lending value. ($1=16,501 dong) (Reporting by Ho Binh Minh; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)