Piramal Capital and Housing Finance net revenue grows 13% to ₹1,954 crore in Q2
MUMBAI: Piramal Enterprises Ltd’s September quarter net revenue for its financial services business grew 13% from a yearago to ₹1,954 crore, thanks to a three-fold growth in housing loan book, the company said on Tuesday.
The Ajay Piramal-led Piramal Capital and Housing Finance’s total loan book stood at ₹53,055 crore at the end of Q2, compared to ₹56,605 crore in the preceding quarter. Its housing finance loan book grew three-fold year-onyear to ₹6,393 crore, but quarteron-quarter growth was muted at 4%.
The financial services business saw repayments of ₹6,525 crore from its wholesale loan portfolio as on 30 September, compared to ₹4,785 crore in the preceding quarter.
Exposure to wholesale residential real estate was 48% of the overall loan book, with 66% of loans towards mid- and latestage, or completed projects, the company said.
Asset quality remained stable, with gross non-performing assets as a percentage of total assets at 0.9%.
On the liabilities side, the company said it has raised ₹24,000 crore of long-term funds since October 2018, through bank termloans, non-convertible debentures and external commercial borrowing.
The company had earlier said that it had repaid debt obligations of ₹30,000 crore in the past one year, of which ₹5,300 crore was repaid in the second quarter of the current fiscal year.
In May, HT Mint had reported that Piramal Capital and Housing Finance Ltd had offloaded ₹2,000 crore of loan exposure to Mumbai-based Lodha Developers Ltd to a unit of Goldman Sachs to bring down its single borrower exposure to the real estate company.
The company said it was looking at inorganic opportunities in retail financing and consumer lending. It will also look at diversifying its borrowing towards long-term sources of funds, it added.
In June, rating agency Icra had downgraded the long-term rating of Piramal Capital and Housing Finance to AA from AA+, citing funding problems. The rating agency had said the slowdown in real estate and the ongoing liquidity crunch could worsen asset quality.
The parent company, Piramal Enterprises, however, reported 15.3% increase in its net profit to ₹554 crore for the September quarter on the back of a robust performance in its pharma and healthcare businesses.
The Mumbai-based diversified conglomerate, which has interests across financial services, pharma and real estate, among others, saw its revenue jump 18% to ₹3,603.56 crore during the reporting quarter.
“Our diversified business model has enabled us to deliver resilient performance during this quarter, despite continued liquidity tightening in the NBFC (nonbanking financial company) sector,” Piramal said in a statement.
PEL’S pharma business grew 19% to ₹1,316 crore, while its India consumer products vertical sustained strong recovery with revenue growth of 39% to ₹112 crore during the September quarter, the company said. Besides, revenue of healthcare insights and analytics grew 14% to ₹333 crore.
“Pharma and healthcare insights businesses continue to consistently deliver strong performance quarter on quarter, acting as a natural hedge and bringing stability to the company’s performance, even in the most volatile market environment,” Piramal added.