State-owned Vietcombank continued to top the chart with a pretax profit of VND11.3 trillion ($487.48 million), a 40.9 percent rise and higher than the combined profit of the next two banks. 

Techcombank was second with VND5.66 trillion ($241.52 million), a more modest 9 percent increase.

Vietinbank earned the third highest pretax profit at VND5.34 trillion ($230.36 million) – rising two places from the end of last year. Its pretax profit grew by one percent after it wrote off bad debts of VND7.5 trillion ($323.55 million), 50 percent higher than in the first half of last year. 

Some banks have posted high profit growth mainly because of the decrease in risk provisions and the increase in their earnings from currency trading and other financial services.

Vietnam International Bank (VIB) saw its pretax profit rise by almost 60 percent to over VND1.8 trillion ($77.65 million), while that of Tien Phong Bank (TPBank) rose 58 percent to VND1.6 trillion ($69 million).

Vietnam has nine wholly-owned foreign banks, four state-owned banks and 31 joint-stock banks.