City Union Bank closed last fiscal with a net profit of Rs 682.85 crore, up from Rs 592 crore registered during the previous year, a senior bank official said on Friday.
Aiding these results was also the conscious decision of the bank to stay away from corporate, consortium and infrastructure project lending which has helped the bank to avoid the non-performing assets (NPA or bad loans) quicksand, City Union Bank Chief Exexcutive N. Kamakodi told reporters here .
"We stayed away from lending to infrastructure, corporate sectors and large consortium lending. Most of the banking sector's NPAs are due to lending to infrastructure sector," he said.
"Even banks smaller than ours got into problems by lending to those sectors. We decided to grow the business with lending to retail, small and medium enterprises (SME) and trading sectors. One has to build the book brick-by-brick," Kamakodi said.
Announcing the bank's results for the fiscal 2018-19, Kamakodi said the year under review saw the bank's total business (deposits and advances) increasing by over Rs 10,000 crore.
Kamakodi said the total business of the bank for the last fiscal ended March stood at Rs 71,513 crore (deposits Rs 38,448 crore, advances Rs 33,065 crore), up from Rs 61,091 crore (deposits Rs 32,853 crore, advances Rs 28,238 crore) posted during 2017-18.
The bank's total income for the year under review stood at Rs 1,131.44 crore, up from Rs 1,086.45 crore earned in 2017-18.
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The bank's board has recommended a dividend of 50 per cent (Re 0.50 paise) per equity share of Re 1 face value for the fiscal 2018-19.
The bank's gross and net NPAs as on March 31, 2019, stood at Rs 977 crore and Rs 591 crore, respectively.
According to Kamakodi, the bank has realised Rs 98 crore last fiscal from old NPA accounts.
He also said the bank will open about 50 new branches and 75-100 automatic teller machine (ATM) centres this fiscal.
--IANS
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