SBI hikes home loan rates by up to 30 bps
Mumbai, May 8: State Bank of India (SBI) has raised its home loan rates that are linked to the repo rate by up to 30 basis points, a move which may be followed by other lenders.
The country's largest lender has also hiked effective interest rates on personal loans against property by 30 basis points (bps).
The decision to increase margin has been taken amid market indications of increased credit risk for borrowers and realty firms in the wake of coronavirus pandemic, a senior official said.
While SBI has kept the external benchmarklinked lending rate constant at 7.05 per cent, the increase in home loan rates has been done by raising margins by up to 30 bps across various home loan products.
The new rates came into effect from May 1, as per information available on its website.
SBI has been offering home loan and few other loans, including personal loan against property, and reverse mortgage since October last year to new borrowers.
The SBI official said spread is the credit risk premium and a rise in spread reflects stress due to Covid-19 impact in the market.
The revision by SBI comes just a month after it had reduced home loan rates by 75 bps.
Pharmaceutical exports de-grew by 23 per cent in the month of March and declined 3 per cent in the March quarter. Drug exports also fell short of the $22 billion estimated set for the full year.
Exports had grown by
11.72 per cent in January, but in February, the growth rate fell to single digits to 7.7 per cent and by March exports slipped into negative territory by
23.24 per cent. This resulted in the fourth quarter recording a negative growth of 2.97 per cent, according to data from the Pharmaceutical Export Promotion Council of India (Pharmaexcil.)
"Being dependent on China for 60-70 per cent of its bulk drug needs, India suffered disruption in the supply chain with the outbreak of Covid-19. Our imports of bulk drugs went down significantly in February. Combined with lockdown measures across several parts of the globe and export restrictions on some of the products contributed to the situation of downturn in export growth," Pharmaexcil said.
Shipments of bulk drugs and drug intermediates, the second largest category in the export basket, registered a negative growth of 0.73 per cent in FY20. However, positive growth of drug formulations and biologicals as well as vaccines and surgicals helped the overall growth of 2019-20
(FY20) stay positive. Drug formulations and biologicals, contributing to almost 72 per cent of exports, grew 9.5 per cent, while vaccines and surgicals recorded 22 per cent and 10.5 per cent growth respectively. With this, pharma exports for FY20 grew 7.57 per cent, though the growth was lower than FY19 rate of 10.72 per cent. In value terms,
FY20 exports came to only
$20.58 billion against the earlier estimate of $22 billion.
With a 34 per cent share, North America was the largest region buying Indian drugs, and of this, the US itself had 32.74 per cent share. At $6.7 billion, exports to the US grew
15.8 per cent. Africa was the second largest exporting region with a 17 per cent share and in the region exports to Tanzania grew by 30.18 per cent. Europe had a share of 15 per cent in the export basket and was closely followed by CIS countries, including Russia.