Aim to maintain 14% loan disbursements in FY17: Sundaram Fin

Asset quality, too, in the last four-five years has been the best, he said.

The company’s civilian market share for the CV, excluding defence and export segments, was in the range of 9-10 percent and has gained 1 percent in the last six months, said Srinivasaraghavan.Below is the verbatim transcript of TT Srinivasaraghavan's interview with Anuj Singhal and Sonia Shenoy on CNBC-TV18. Anuj: Let’s start with your net profit number that’s gone up, while your net interest income (NII) hasn’t gone up much, if you could tell us what led to this 34 percent rise in net profit? A: I have sort of maintained over a long period of time, quarterly numbers being less because clearly we don’t have smooth distribution of either incomes or other items through the year - - quarter I wouldn’t make too much of the quarterly spike except to say that overall in the last H2 there has been a definite uptrend in the medium and heavy commercial vehicle sector, that is clearly showing through. The other factor is that our asset quality I would say the best it has been in probably the last 4 or 5 years, that’s had it effect on our provisioning, so it’s a combination of several things, but overall I would say that it’s good to see robust growth coming back into the medium and heavy commercial vehicle segment. It’s good to see operators’ viability improving largely because of stability of diesel prices and overall the macroeconomic environment has been positive and with the prediction that is being made about the normal monsoon I think we are all generally a little more optimistic than we were at the same time last year let say. Sonia: Your loan disbursements this year were solid with a 15 percent growth at about Rs 11,400 crore. Can you give us a ballpark estimate of what the loan disbursements could be next year? A: The reason I won’t stick my neck out too much on that is there are two big ifs one is the monsoon and the other is the spend in the infrastructure sector roads specifically, if both of these things happened then definitely we can aspire to repeat of what we have done this year, but the reason we haven’t sort of committed to a number is because these are imponderables if you will at this point. A little later in the year we may be in a position to sort of commit to a more definitive number, but as I say if everything pans out as is being predicted then certainly we look to a repeat of this year at least. Sonia: You were telling us about how the commercial vehicle space has gone up. How much market share do you enjoy in the commercial vehicle segment itself in financing of CVs and how much has it gone up over the last 3-6 months? A: We compute market share on the basis of what we call civilian market share because there are parts of the market where we don’t participate which is basically the defence sector and the state transport undertakings, if you exclude that what remains is what we call the civilian sector. In the civilian sector we have between 9-10 percent market share. This is on an all India basis, but there are parts of the market where we don’t operate, so if you sort of adjust for that we will about 11-12 percent market share and we would have gained perhaps about 1 percent in the last six months.