Put two numbers about Sacombank side by side and they don't seem to fit. According to PYN Elite's September 26 letter to investors, the bank's trailing 12-month profit fell by about 84%.CafeF Over the same stretch, STB shares climbed from VND 58,000 at the last session of 2025 to VND 77,200 on September 28, a gain of about 33.1%. On the morning of September 29 the stock was unchanged at VND 77,200, roughly 1% below its highest close of the year, VND 78,000 on September 10.
So why are buyers paying more for a bank that is earning less? The answer lies in splitting reported profit into two pieces: what the bank earns from its business, and what it sets aside to cover bad loans.
Provisions: the money isn't gone, but the profit is
Think of a provision as money you put aside because you suspect a borrower won't pay you back. For a bank, that set-aside is booked as an expense, so reported profit drops in the same period even though no cash has actually been lost. If the bank later collects the loan or sells the collateral, the provision can be written back and the profit returns.
Sacombank is in the middle of that cycle. In 2025 the bank reviewed and reclassified its loan book, pushing its bad-debt ratio to 6.41% at year-end.Vietstock In Q4 2025 alone, provisions of more than VND 9,230 billion tipped the bank into a pre-tax loss of over VND 3,360 billion, leaving full-year 2025 pre-tax profit at just VND 7,628 billion.VnExpress
Provisioning stayed heavy this year. Per the Q2 financial statements, Sacombank's credit-loss provisions for the first half of 2026 reached VND 7,119 billion, up 542.7% year on year. First-half pre-tax profit therefore came in at only VND 4,136 billion, down 43.6%, while the loan-loss reserve swelled to VND 27,177 billion, up 35.5% from the start of the year.Báo Đầu tư
What stands out in the financials is that the core business did not shrink along with profit. Net interest income fell 8.6% in the first half, but non-interest income rose almost 2.5 times, so operating profit before provisions still grew by more than 33%.Báo Đầu tư Put simply, the bank earned more than a year ago and then used most of the increase to build its reserve.
That is why PYN's roughly 84% decline needs to be read in its proper window. The trailing 12 months still include Q4 2025 and its pre-tax loss of over VND 3,360 billion. Once that quarter rolls out of the window early next year, the trailing figure will change on its own, whether or not the new quarter is any better.
The share price is running ahead of earnings
There are at least two explanations for STB's roughly 33% gain. The first is PYN's argument: reported profit is being dragged down by additional provisions while core operating performance has improved.CafeF The 33%-plus rise in pre-provision profit is the data point that supports this reading.
The second is ownership. According to a report by Vietcombank Securities (VCBS), a plan to auction the 32.5% stake held by VAMC has been submitted to the State Bank of Vietnam and is awaiting approval.CafeF This is a separate driver, not directly tied to provisioning, and no approval date has been announced.
The data can't cleanly split how much each factor contributed, but the first explanation rests on firmer numbers: buyers of STB are pricing the profit the bank will earn once the old debt is cleared, not the profit it is reporting now.
Trading volume suggests buyers are also waiting. Over the last 20 sessions STB averaged about 3.04 million shares a day, less than half its year-to-date average of about 7.46 million. A price sitting near its high while volume thins out points to a market waiting for concrete evidence.
Bamboo Airways is the nearest test
The nearest piece of evidence is the Bamboo Airways loan. In its Q3 2026 banking-sector earnings outlook, VCBS said Sacombank could fully resolve this exposure, with outstanding debt of VND 3,000–4,000 billion, in the second half of 2026 and book it as extraordinary income.CafeF If the loan has already been provisioned, any cash recovered goes straight to profit.
Actual progress has so far stopped at seizing collateral. On March 31, Sacombank decided to seize 86,308.9 m² of land in the villa zone of the Dak Doa complex in Gia Lai, owned by FLC Group. On June 11, the bank's debt-management arm went on to seize property rights arising from a construction sale-and-purchase contract.CafeF Reports available as of September 29 do not show that the bank has sold those assets or recovered the debt.
The borrower is in no position to pay on its own. Planespotters data cited by CafeF shows Bamboo Airways now has just one aircraft in operation, down from 8 at the end of 2025.CafeF Recovery therefore depends almost entirely on selling the seized land and property rights at a price high enough to cover the loan.
Two forecasts that differ mainly on timing
VCBS forecasts Sacombank's 2026 pre-tax profit at VND 11,638 billion, up 53%.Người Quan Sát PYN projects 2026 profit of about VND 6,160 billion, followed by more than VND 20,300 billion in 2027 and nearly VND 29,800 billion in 2028.CafeF Sacombank's own plan, set earlier this year, is VND 8,100 billion in pre-tax profit, sitting between the two.Vietstock
The two forecasts are not measured the same way. VCBS specifies pre-tax profit, while the report does not say whether PYN's figure is before or after tax. Even if it is after-tax, grossing it up at a 20% tax rate gives only about VND 7,700 billion, still nearly VND 4,000 billion below VCBS.
The biggest gap sits in Q4. VCBS expects Q3 pre-tax profit of VND 3,542 billion, down 3% year on year.Người Quan Sát Add the VND 4,136 billion from the first half, and reaching VND 11,638 billion for the year requires a Q4 pre-tax profit of about VND 3,960 billion. That would be the most profitable quarter of the year, set against a loss of over VND 3,360 billion in the same quarter of 2025. The VCBS forecast therefore leans heavily on large loans being resolved within this year.
PYN's path reads differently: 2026 stays low, and the big jump shifts to 2027. Both sides may well agree that the old debt will be dealt with; they differ on when. Readers should also keep in mind that PYN is a shareholder. STB was the fund's largest holding at 17.9% as of September 16, and the fund had to trim it because internal rules cap any single stock at 20% of the portfolio.CafeF A large shareholder's forecast is useful information, but it should be read alongside that position.
The risk if debt resolution runs late
Sacombank's cushion is still thin. At the end of Q2, its bad-debt ratio rose to 7.54% and its bad-debt coverage ratio stood at only 57%, meaning reserves covered just over half of its bad loans.Báo Đầu tư If the Bamboo Airways assets remain unsold, or the 32.5% stake auction is not approved, the bank may need to keep provisioning in the coming quarters. Reported profit would then stay low, and a share price already up about 33% would lack an earnings floor beneath it.
For newer investors, STB is a useful case for avoiding two misreadings. The first is treating a sharp profit decline as proof that the business is deteriorating, when most of the drop comes from provisions. The second is treating a forecast as a done deal, when the forecasts differ by thousands of billions of dong and depend on events that have not happened yet.
Two milestones will settle the timing question
The optimistic scenario is that the clean-up peaks this year; the cautious one is that the earnings recovery waits until 2027. What separates them is not whether the old debt gets resolved, but how fast.
The first checkpoint is the Q3 financial report, expected in October. If Q3 provisions come in clearly below the VND 5,095 billion booked in Q2, that would signal the clean-up is past its peak.Báo Đầu tư The second is an announcement that the Bamboo Airways collateral has been sold before year-end; without it, the high VCBS forecast has little to stand on.
If both milestones slip, the path PYN describes, with earnings pushed into 2027, becomes the more realistic scenario. In that case, STB's current price is running at least a year ahead of its profits.