SBI to create `10K cr Covid book for healthcare & pharma
The country’s largest lender, State Bank of India (SBI), is planning to create a Covid-19 loan book of Rs 10,000 crore for the domestic healthcare and pharma sector. The country’s leading vaccine makers Bharat Biotech, Biological E have already received creditlines from the lender.
“The Covid book that is expected to be created under the recent guidelines that have come from the RBI on May 5, we are quite upbeat on this particular sector. We will certainly support this sector. We have some plans and have come out with some schemes which we will be rolling out as of now. As of now we have observed that the pharma sector is of course cash rich…Rs
10,000 crore of Covid portfolio we want to create,” said Dinesh Khara, chairman SBI while announcing the bank’s
Q4 earnings.
Given the widespread resurgence in Covid-19 infections across the country, the RBI this month announced an ontap liquidity window of Rs 50,000 crore, with a tenor of up to three years, that can be provided by banks for lending support to entities such as hospitals, diagnostics, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies or importers, medical oxygen manufacturers and suppliers and other operators involved in the critical
healthcare supply chain. This has been done to ease the liquidity position and financial constraints being faced by these emergency healthcare service providers, consequent to the significantly higher load on these entities in the recent weeks.
Meanwhile, the lender registered a net profit of Rs 6,451 crore in Q4FY21 as compared to Rs 3,581 crore in Q4FY20, an increase of 80 per cent on lower provisions, stable asset quality and other income. Sequentially the net profit increased by
24.14 per cent.
SBI continued to be resilient by containing asset quality within guidance. Total slippages and restructuring for
FY21 was at Rs 46,416 crore, within the guidance of Rs 60,000 crore. The provision buffer stood at Rs 25,376 crore, including Covid related provision of Rs 6,346 crore. Gross NPA saw a decline of 45 basis points QoQ to 4.98 per cent from
5.44 per cent. Net interest income grew by 18.8 per cent YoY and declined 6 per cent QoQ.