State-owned term lender IFCI Ltd reported a marginal rise of 5 percent in net profit at Rs 182.61 crore for the second quarter ended September 2015. Company's net profit for the July-September quarter of the previous fiscal was at Rs 173.91 crore. The small rise in net profit was mainly attributed to higher provisioning and write-off as well as high cost of borrowing.
Total income of the company rose by a substantial 28.32 percent to Rs 1,121.92 crore during the second quarter of the current fiscal as against Rs 874.33 crore a year ago. "Income rose primarily as our loan book has also gone up. Also, we had disinvestment of 1.5 percent stake in NSE, so that has give us some Rs 200 crore.
"Other income grew as we sold some real estate which IFCI was holding. We sold the office space and residential properties not in use," Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director Malay Mukherjee said while announcing the quarterly earnings here. Company's net interest income increased to Rs 189.75 crore during the period, from Rs 144.37 crore a year ago.
IFCI Ltd made a provisioning towards bad and doubtful assets as well as write-off to the tune of Rs 231.80 crore in the second quarter, up from Rs 117.59 crore in the same period of previous fiscal. "...we had invested in shares of a Kolkata-based steel company. The value of the share prices of that company as on September 30 had gone below 75 percent.
So we had to make a provision of Rs 70 crore towards that. "Going forward, if the valuation of the company goes up by December, which we are seeing, the provisioning will be reversed," Mukherjee said. On asset quality, the infrastructure lender made further improvement with gross NPAs falling to 9.67 percent as against 9.73 percent of gross advances a year ago.
Net NPAs too improved at 6.65 percent from 6.73 percent earlier. Since March 2013, the company has substantially reduced its bad assets from gross NPAs measuring as high as 19.2 percent, while net NPAs stood at 10.2 percent. Mukherjee said the company hopes to bring the current level of NPAs further by one percentage point by March 2016.
He said the business climate has been improving and there has been an uptick in loan demand. However, the company would be cautious about steel and power sectors. "The loan take off is good. Loan growth in real estate, infrastructure and manufacturing sector is good. But for steel and power sector, we want to be careful," he said. In reply to a question on company's fund raising plans, he said at present IFCI is well capitalised, with capital adequacy ratio of 17.9 percent, including tier-I capital at 12.2 percent.
However, going forward into the next fiscal, the company may raise about Rs 2,000 crore as and when the need arises.
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