MUMBAI: ICICI Bank Ltd, India's biggest private sector lender by assets, reported a surge in bad loans for the December quarter partly due to a central bank direction to reclassify some troubled loan accounts as bad loans.
Net profit rose 4.5 percent to 30.18 billion rupees ($443 million) for its fiscal third quarter to Dec. 31, from 28.89 billion rupees reported a year earlier, the bank said in a statement on Thursday.
Analysts on average had expected a net profit of 30.17 billion rupees for the bank, which is also listed in New York.
Gross bad loans as a percentage of total loans widened to 4.72 percent in the December quarter from 3.77 percent in the previous three months.