Associate's poor show took a toll on Q1 numbers: NIIT

NIIT's net profit declined to Rs 7.4 crore from Rs 15 crore year-on-year in the first quarter of FY17. This, Chief Executive Officer of NIIT, Rahul Patwardhan, says it was due to its associate NIIT Tech's decline in profits.The company's corporate learning group (CLG) has been guided to have 12 percent margins, better than the 9 percent currently.  Patwardhan clarified that in the constant currency basis, the revenues from the CLG business for the first quarter of FY17 rose by 13 percent. The 19 percent rise in revenues is in rupee terms. He maintains a guidance of 15 percent for the second quarter of FY17.Below is the verbatim transcript of Rahul Patwardhan's interview to Reema Tendulkar & Mangalam Maloo.Mangalam: Strong operational performance but below the operational performance your net profit halved from Rs 15 crore to Rs 7 crore. Could you explain?A: Operationally we have done extremely well in the quarter ahead of our plans, 12 percent topline growth, which is the first time we are seeing double digit growth for the last 16 quarters and 36 percent growth in the EBITDA. The profit after tax (PAT) numbers has declined. We must keep in mind that we get a substantial profit share from our associate investment in the NIIT Technologies. This quarter they have reported 1 time exceptional reduction in their profits and that obviously has an impact on us plus we have had small forex impact for the quarter but that tends to happen every few quarters. So overall the main contributor has been the fact that our associate profit went down by more than half and that explains most of the difference.