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State-owned Punjab National Bank (PNB) has said its standalone net loss narrowed to Rs 697.20 crore in the fourth quarter ended March 31, due to lower provisioning against bad loans.
The second largest public sector lender had posted a loss of Rs 4,750 crore in January-March period of 2018-19. The bank’s total income during the March quarter rose to Rs 16,388.32 crore from Rs 14,725.13 crore in the year-ago period.
Addressing media PNB managing director S S Mallikarjuna Rao on Saturday said the bank has done the cash recovery of Rs 10,000 crore during the fiscal, while containing the fresh slippages to Rs 20,000 crore. There are some leftovers from the previous year, including big accounts like Bhushan Power and Steel, which are expected to get resolved in the ongoing financial year.
During the quarter, the bank earned an operating profit of Rs 3,932.28 crore as against Rs 2,861.18 crore in the same period previous fiscal.
On the assets quality front, PNB witnessed improvement as the gross non-performing assets (NPAs) which were brought down to 14.21 per cent of gross advances at the end of March 2020, as against 15.50 per cent in March 2019. Net NPAs or bad loans also came down to 5.78 per cent as against 6.56 per cent in the year-ago period.
Provision other than tax and contingencies too declined to Rs 4,901.31 crore from Rs 10,007.11 crore in the same period a year ago. For the full fiscal 2019-20, the bank’s earned profit of Rs 363.34 crore, as against a loss of Rs 10,026.41 crore during 2018-19. Total income during the fiscal rose to Rs 64,306.13 crore as against Rs 59,514.53 crore in the previous financial year.
As per the RBI’s April 17 guidelines, the bank has decided not to make any dividend pay-outs to shareholders despite posting profit after a gap of two years. As per the direction, the bank has done restructuring of 37,409 MSME accounts aggregating to Rs 1,761.74 crore as on March 31, 2020.
