The loss was suffered by ECL Finance, which is registered as a non banking financial company (NBFC) with the Reserve Bank of India.
When contacted, an ECL spokesperson said, "We have made a general loss provision of 0.50 per cent on loan assets and it is for the first time that we are making a provision for losses. The provisioning was made as the loan was extended to clients against capital market related instruments, the value of which may have depreciated after the recent market fall."
ECL Finance has outstanding loans of around Rs 914 crore. "However, as a company policy, it has been decided to make a 0.50 per cent provision for losses from now on standard loan assets with the NBFC," said the spokesperson.
ECL reported a net profit of Rs 82.6 crore compared to Rs 37.4 crore on a year-on-year basis and Rs 96.4 crore quarter-on-quarter.
The provisioning by ECL follows similar action by Prime Securities, Geojit Financial Services and Motilal Oswal Financial.
Moreover, it shows that brokerage houses involved in propriety trading, margin funding and extending loans against securities were hit the most by the recent market meltdown. Prime Securities has announced the highest loss provisioning of Rs 23 crore for depletion in the value of securities held in its propriety account.
As the market has lost more than 5,000 points since the start of 2008, the bad debts and client defaults have been piling up.
Yet another broking outfit Emkay Shares made a provisioning of Rs 1.06 crore on Friday. "The losses mainly arose from defaults by clients who traded through our company and where the chances of recovery were less," said Saket Agarwal of Emkay.
Market players are of the view that a good number of NBFCs are abstaining from announcing a one-time hit by losses arising out of margin funding or loans against securities. Instead, the broking houses are carrying forward the huge losses as loans under recovery and announcing only minuscule bad debts.
Through this move, broking firms can avoid making huge provisions for losses and, to a great extent, neutralise a possible negative impact on their share prices.
Stock prices normally take a hit if a company's provisioning or write downs is huge, according to experts.
