(Adds details, context)

HANOI Jan 5 (Reuters) – VietinBank,
Vietnam’s largest partly private lender by assets, reported on
Thursday that its gross profit last year surged 76 percent from
2010 to 8.11 trillion dong ($385.5 million), far higher than it
projected.

The Hanoi-based lender said in a statement it was targeting
a 20 percent increase in gross profit this year from 2011,
bringing the profit to around $462.5 million.

“The bank will speed up the equitisation process,” the
statement quoted Pham Huy Hung, VietinBank’s chairman, as saying
at a meeting on its business plans for this year. “Equitisation”
is the term Vietnamese officials use to describe the process of
partial privatisation.

The lender has been in talks to sell a 15 percent stake to
Canada’s Bank of Nova Scotia, but it had not finalised
the deal by the end of last year as planned because of price
issues, a central bank official has said.

VietinBank, 10 percent owned by the International Finance
Corp, had raised its total assets to 460.4 trillion dong ($21.9
billion), up 25.4 percent from the beginning of 2011, the
statement said. It has projected assets to rise 20 percent this
year from 2011 to around $26.28 billion.

Non-performing loans accounted for 0.74 percent out of the
lender’s total credit and it has projected to keep bad debts at
below 3 percent this year, the statement said.

Bad debts at Vietnamese banks could rise to between 3.6
percent and 3.8 percent of total loans by the end of 2011,
central bank governor Nguyen Van Binh said in November.

($1 = 21,026 dong)

(Reporting by Ngo Thi Ngoc Chau; Editing by John Ruwitch and
Matt Driskill)