State-run Allahabad Bank on Friday said it has posted a net loss of Rs 3,834.07 crore in the fourth quarter of the financial year 2018-19 (FY 19), widening from a net loss of Rs 3,509.63 crore in the year-ago period.
The lender is planning to raise Rs 1,200 crore through Qualified Institutional Placement (QIP) this fiscal, the bank's MD and CEO S.S. Mallikarjuna Rao said.
"We will have to raise around Rs 4,500 crore to bring down government holding to 75 per cent by October 2020 and look at various fund raising options including QIP for the same," he told reporters here.
The QIP is likely to bring down government holding by about 7-8 basis points by the end of this fiscal, he said.
At the end of the last fiscal, the government shareholding into the bank was at 85.82 per cent.
The Kolkata-headquartered lender, which recently came out of the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) measure of Reserve Bank of India, is expecting to turn profitable by the first quarter of this fiscal.
According to Rao, it is hopeful of registering an operating profit of close to Rs 750-800 crore in the first quarter.
The bank's operating profit, in the quarter under review, stood at Rs 634.26 crore, up from Rs 122.9 crore in the corresponding period of the financial year 2017-18 (FY18).
"We hope to be able to achieve an operating profit of Rs 1,000-1,200 crore a quarter by the fourth quarter of this fiscal," he said.
Gross non-performing assets, in absolute term, stood at Rs 28,704.78 crore by end of the March quarter of FY19 as against Rs 28,218.79 crore by end December, 2018 while the net NPAs were at Rs 7,419.31 crore as on March 31, 2019, down from Rs 10,865.26 crore in December quarter end.
By end of the FY19, gross NPAs, as a percentage of total loans, was at 17.55 per cent, down marginally from 17.81 per cent in December quarter and net NPAs as a percentage of total loans stood at 5.22 per cent, also down from 7.7 per cent from the quarter ended December 31, 2018.
The bank is confident of keeping the net NPAs in the range of 5.5 per cent-5.7 per cent by end of this fiscal, Rao said.
The bank also said provision for bad loans increased to Rs 5,278.88 crore in the quarter ended March, 31, 2019 from Rs 5,126 crore in same quarter of previous fiscal. Its capital adequacy ratio stood at Rs 12.51 per cent at the end of FY19, improving from 10.42 per cent in the December quarter.
Total business stood at Rs 3,77,887 crore by end of FY19 and it is targeting 9 per cent credit growth and 10 per cent deposits growth in the current fiscal, Rao added.
--IANS
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