MUMBAI: The nation's top lender State Bank of India today beat all forecasts with a wide margin and logged in a smart 14.08 per cent jump in the December quarter standalone net profit at Rs 2,828 crore, driven by a surge in credit offtake and better margins that offset a massive 84.02 per cent spike in provisioning for bad loans. The State Bank, which controls a quarter of the domestic bank loans and deposits along with its associates, saw its net interest income zooming by a massive 43.28 per cent to Rs 9,050 crore compared to Rs 6,316 crore in the year-ago quarter.
The bank also saw its net interest margin rising by 84 bps to 3.40 per cent and a robust 24.35 per cent jump in interest income.
The bank had posted profit of Rs 2,479 crore in the third quarter of the past fiscal.
"We have reported good numbers for the December quarter despite a massive 84.02 per cent voluntary hike in provisioning for bad loans at Rs 1,797 crore for Q3,taking our total bad loan provisioning to Rs 5,528 crore (in excess of RBI norms) to enable the bank reach a PCR of 64.07 per cent. Had it not been for this, our profit could have been much higher at Rs 3280 crore, a growth of 32.31 per cent ," chairman Om Prakash Bhatt told reporters at the bank headquarters here today.
The consensus forecast for the bank's numbers was a 10-11 per cent jump in net. But the bank surprised every analyst with robust quarterly figures.
Analysts were worried that the bank might again report higher bad loans this quarter. Surprisingly, the bank saw a major decline in its bad assets to just Rs 233 crore during the reporting quarter. Against this, in the first and second quarters of the current fiscal, SBI's bad assets stood at Rs 1,290 crore and Rs 2380 crore, respectively.
