Look at the numbers and PNJ's second quarter of 2026 reads like a contradiction: net revenue rose 11.9% year-on-year to VND 8,484 billion, yet the company still posted a net loss of VND 283 billion.Tuổi Trẻ It's the first loss-making quarter for Vietnam's largest jewelry retailer since it listed on HOSE, nearly 18 years ago.Tài chính Doanh nghiệp The loss didn't come from weak sales. It came from a single expense line booked after the accounting period closed. At the same time, two foreign value-fund groups just pushed their PNJ stakes above the 5% ownership threshold, even as the stock remains more than half off its old high.
The loss came from one provision line, not from weak sales
Between July 1 and 20, PNJ recorded VND 1,588 billion in sales while the value of goods customers brought back for buyback hit VND 5,900 billion: nearly 3.7 times sales revenue over the same stretch.Tuổi Trẻ After PNJ adjusted its buyback process starting July 21, the pressure eased sharply: over the following seven days, sales reached VND 1,393 billion while buyback value dropped to VND 1,162 billion, with 95% of customers opting to exchange for other products rather than take cash.Tuổi Trẻ All told, in the first 27 days of July, PNJ paid out more than VND 7,000 billion buying back gold and diamonds.
Q2 general and administrative expenses jumped to VND 1,062 billion, more than 5.2 times the year-ago figure, mostly because PNJ booked an estimated provision of VND 865 billion for buyback activity that occurred after the accounting period ended.Tuổi Trẻ In other words, this is a July cost recorded retroactively into Q2's books. Strip out the provision and PNJ would still have been profitable for the quarter. For the first half overall, the company still reported a net profit of VND 1,184 billion, up from VND 1,114 billion a year earlier.Tuổi Trẻ
That doesn't mean the underlying business is untouched. Q2 gross margin fell to 18.4%, down from 21.5% a year earlier, as gold input costs rose faster than revenue. Interest expense climbed 74% year-on-year. Both pressures predate the diamond shock and will persist after it, separate from the one-off provision above.
The root cause is a crisis of trust
The chain of events began in early July, when Đặng Ngọc Thảo, former director of PNJ's wholly owned grading unit, Công ty TNHH MTV Giám định PNJ (P-Lab), came under investigation in a case involving the smuggling of 28,000 diamonds.VietnamFinance Once the entity that certifies diamond quality is called into question, so is every grading report customers are already holding.
PNJ Chairwoman Cao Thị Ngọc Dung sent an apology letter to shareholders, stating that the 28,000 smuggled diamonds never entered PNJ's distribution system.Tuổi Trẻ But the reassurance came after the wave of customers bringing jewelry back for resale had already started, and that wave is what actually hit the financial statements.
The market reacted accordingly. PNJ shares hit the daily floor limit for three straight sessions on July 3, 6 and 7, then kept sliding to a low of VND 30,750 on July 24, losing more than half their value within the month of July alone. Against the January 30 peak of VND 84,667, that's a 55.95% decline. Market capitalization shrank from roughly VND 32,300 billion to about VND 15,800 billion by end-July,afamily and stood at VND 12,700 billion as of the August 20 session.
Foreign ownership reversed direction twice in six weeks
This is the part most likely to be misread. Foreign investors did not uniformly buy into PNJ. The past six weeks have seen two opposite flows, at two distinct points in time.
The outflow happened in July: a fund group managed by VinaCapital sold more than 3 million shares on July 8, cutting its stake to 4.9999% and stepping down as a major shareholder, just over three months after crossing the 5% threshold.Dân Trí On July 22, Dragon Capital also exited as a major shareholder.Tuổi Trẻ
The inflow happened in August, roughly three to four weeks after the outflow. A foreign investor group represented by Sprucegrove Investment Management, including Vanguard International Value Fund and four Sprucegrove-branded funds, bought a net 1.63 million shares, lifting its stake from 4.72% to 5.04% as of August 14.CafeF Four funds under T. Rowe Price Associates bought 525,300 shares in the August 13 session, taking the group's combined stake from 4.97% to 5.07%.VnEconomy
The names of the funds buying in tell their own story: Vanguard International Value Fund, T. Rowe Price Global Value Equity Fund. Both are explicitly value-style investors that typically buy once a stock has been discounted well below asset value, and are willing to hold through several rough quarters. The funds that exited earlier were regional players with growth expectations tied to near-term outlook. The two groups aren't contradicting each other; they're simply operating on different time horizons.
The funds' actual motives haven't been disclosed. Besides valuation, at least two other explanations are plausible: index-tracking rebalancing after a sharp share-price drop, or quantitative screens based on P/B that don't carry any independent judgment on the P-Lab affair. Public data isn't sufficient to rule either out. Around the same period, PNJ CEO Phan Quốc Công completed a purchase of 1 million shares between July 31 and August 14, spending roughly VND 36 billion.Dân Trí
Cheap on paper, but the denominator is the real question
PNJ's P/B currently sits at 1.54x, below the company's own 2023-2026 average of 1.73x and near the low end of that range. P/E based on the latest quarterly earnings is meaningless given the loss.
The problem with P/B here is the denominator. PNJ's book value is dominated by inventory: VND 15,149 billion at the end of Q2, or 72.1% of total assets. When customers bring diamond jewelry back for resale, the recoverable value of that inventory is exactly the variable that has to be estimated. PNJ has said the VND 865 billion provision was built on assumptions about estimated recovery value and adjustment ratios by diamond size category. That's an estimate, not a figure that has been finalized.
On liquidity, PNJ held VND 608 billion in cash and equivalents plus VND 3,294 billion in term deposits at the end of June.Tuổi Trẻ But that's a snapshot from before July's buyback wave, so it doesn't reflect the company's current cash position; the Q3 report will be the first to show how much of that VND 7,000-billion-plus outflow actually drained the balance sheet. Foreign ownership at PNJ currently stands at 44.43%, with about 21.3 million shares of remaining room, equal to just over 4% of charter capital. Room for further foreign buying still exists, but it isn't wide.
Three data points to watch before October
August 25 is the record date for the shareholder list attending PNJ's extraordinary general meeting. The company switched from collecting shareholder opinions in writing to convening an in-person meeting, expected in October 2026, to approve the 2026 business plan.Dân Trí Both fund groups that just crossed the 5% threshold will be on that list.
For individual investors following PNJ, the useful lens right now isn't "buy or sell." It's three data points that will surface in sequence. First is the revised 2026 business plan management presents at the October meeting, which will show how management itself assesses the damage. Second is the ratio of buyback value to revenue in Q3, a direct gauge of whether customer trust has returned. Third is whether the VND 865 billion provision gets partially reversed or needs topping up.
Of the three, the second arrives soonest and says the most. A jewelry retailer lives on customers trusting the grading certificate that comes with the merchandise. Once the buyback-to-revenue ratio normalizes, the rest of the income statement should recover along with it. Until it does, every cheap-looking valuation metric at PNJ is being calculated on a denominator that hasn't settled. That's exactly why the value funds moving in now are willing to hold through a period that's still unresolved.