LIC Housing Finance Expects Its NPAs To Decline In The March Quarter

LIC Housing Finance Ltd. expects its stressed loans to decline in the last quarter of the ongoing financial year.

“I am hopeful that the present NPA will be reduced in the last quarter because a lot of work is being done. We are negotiating with developers whose accounts are NPAs,” Siddhartha Mohanty, managing director and chief executive officer of the company, told BloombergQuint in an interview. “We are expecting some final orders. We already have some orders to be implemented by February or March. We will make some headway as far as recovery is concerned. I foresee some improvement in NPA figure.”

LIC Housing Finance’s gross NPA ratio rose 32 basis points sequentially to 2.73 percent in the October-December quarter, according to an exchange filing. That hurt its earnings during the period.

LIC Housing Finance Q3 Results: Key Highlights: (YoY, Consolidated)

• Net interest income rose 13.26 percent to Rs 1,257 crore.
• Profit after tax fell 0.83 percent to Rs 602.25 crore.
• Total disbursements were at Rs 13,177 crore versus Rs 12,778 crore.

“There has been a 13 percent growth in revenue from operations. Our home loan segment has also shown 16 percent growth. Despite that there has been a slight increase in NPA. For that, we have provided Rs 390 crore additional provisioning. That’s why our profit has been flattish,” Mohanty said.

According to him, while the company was able to “contain builder-book NPA” in the third quarter, overall bad loans rose because of norms that mandates it to take multiple accounts into NPA even when it’s only one account.

“All those things will be in control in the current quarter,” Mohanty added.

WATCH | CEO Siddhartha Mohanty on LIC Housing Finance’s Q3 results