Foreign investment in Vietnam's stock market is estimated to increase to 5.5 billion U.S. dollars by late 2007 from some 4 billion dollars currently, local newspaper Saigon Liberation said on Thursday.

Foreign investors are now pouring about 4 billion dollars into the local bourse, and they can invest additional 1.5 billion dollars in the next six months, the newspaper quoted Nguyen Ngoc Bao, head of the Monetary Policy Department under the State Bank of Vietnam as saying.

Vietnam had more than 100,000 stock investors by the end of 2006, over trebling that in late 2005 and increasing over 30 times than that in 2000. Of the investors, some 1,700 are foreign ones who, including such international investors as JP Morgan, Merryll Lynch and Citygroup, are holding 25-30 percent of shares of listed companies, according to the country's State Securities Commission.

Vietnam currently has 107 kinds of listed shares, 367 kinds of listed bonds, mostly government bonds, and 2 listed investment funds totaling over 71,953 billion Vietnamese (nearly 4.5 billion dollars).

Source: Xinhua