ICICI Bank income jump down by 35% in Q4

India’s largest private sector bank ICICI Bank reported their net profit for January-March of RS 744 Crore which is drop of 35 % from last quarter.

ICICI banks last year profit increase due to their higher bad debts, slowdown in loan off take and lower fee-base income were from distribution of financial products. ICICI Bank’s forth quarter profit so lower than analyst’s anticipation of Rs 774 Crore.

Even though goods news for investors in spite of a fall in profits, ICICI has decided to maintain it’s dividend payout at Rs 11/share.

The bank's total profits too chop down throughout Q4, by 11.4%, to Rs 9,203 crore from Rs 10,391 crore a year previous. Lately it has slowed lending as it is annoying to tackle a rising bad loans in its main business section, the retail market. It is also trying to increase the share of low-cost deposits — savings account and current account — in its total deposits.

On a consolidated basis, for the full year ended March 2009 (FY09), the bank's net profit jumped 10.6% to Rs 3,757 crore compared to Rs 3,398 crore during the previous year. Its total income during FY09 rose 6.8% to Rs 64,153 crore from Rs 60,053 crore during FY08.

For the current year, ICICI Bank has decided to slow down its lending activities as bad debts are hurting. Chanda Kochhar, the CEO-designate, said that ICICI Bank's corporate and retail loan is expected to grow at about 5-10%. "This coming year we'll moderate our loan growth," Kochhar said in a post-result call. "Our policy would be to protect liquidity, conserve capital, contain risk and watch how the economic scenario moves and actually focus on restructuring our deposit base."