Ladies and gentlemen, good day. Welcome to IDFC First Bank Q1 FY 2024 Results Conference Call on, hosted by ICICI Securities. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Chintan Shah from ICICI Securities. Thank you. Over to you, sir.
Thank you. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Q1 FY 2024 Results Conference Call, call for IDFC First Bank. We have with us from the management, Mr. V. Vaidyanathan, Managing Director and CEO, IDFC First Bank, along with the management team. Without further delay, I would like now, now like to hand over the floor to the management. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Hello, good evening, everybody. This is Vaidyanathan.
Good evening, everyone. I'm Sudhanshu Jain.
Hi, everyone, this is Saptarshi Bapary.
First of all, thank you very much, everybody, for joining us for this evening call. We, we are all very happy to speak to you. We are quite happy as we are presenting this quarter's results because it's, it's now establishing the steady direction we have set for ourselves. Almost all the numbers we have that the last few quarters, they seem to be just continuing on a linear curve in terms of the loan book, in terms of earnings, in terms of, you know, profitability. I'd say that this is pretty much on track, and I'd imagine no major surprises.
I'd like to step back and actually, share with you what are the key things that is, we feel, the top-line comments that come to our mind off the cuff. One is, that, when we look at our bank, oftentimes we tend to think of it, that we have a, a loan book that is now coming across linearly and, so the deposits. Actually, the, when we look at the bank, it's a lot more than just the loan book. Because it's, you know, we have brought up in the presentation what are the various lines of business we do.
Apart from the lines of businesses we've mentioned, you know, we have a, now beginning to have very strong presence in the NRI Banking, wealth management, credit card business, within which we got, you know, Private Card, Millennia Card, a number of various versions of that. We've got a FASTag. We are now gaining traction in trade finance, in transaction banking, cash management, treasury, supply chain solution, corporate lending, you know, the whole thing. Now, let me just say the first point that correct is that the bank is becoming more and more universal bank, and our lines of revenue are pretty much getting much more diversified.
Compared to, let me say, being only a lending business where line of, where fee income normally becomes lines of, like, becomes disbursement, disbursement income or maybe the annual income that we get from customers as they start transacting with us. With a much wider range, we are able to, on a bank platform, we're able to, of course, deliver to the customers a much wider suite of services and the consequence, of course, start getting revenue lines across. The second thing to note for the bank, of course, is that the, on the, lines of businesses within lending, it's now really very diversified.
Close to about 24% of the loan book of the bank is, 28% actually is backed by mortgages, which is basically 24%, which is home loans and loan against property. You know, we've got business banking product, which is basically working capital to small businesses, that is again backed by, by property or mortgages. We've got Kisan Credit Card is about 1% of our book. Book meaning, the whole book, not retail, this is the whole bank-level book. We got that. You know, we've got business banking is about 3% of the book. You add all of them up, close to about 28% of the book is now backed by mortgages. You've got Wheels, which is about 10% of the book.
Commercial vehicle and construction equipment financing is 2%, consumer loans is 13%, education loan is 1%, credit card is 2%, other retail loans is 7%, gold loans is, you know, just what started, I guess, less than 1% now. Then rural finance is 11%, SME is 5%, large corporate is 1%, emerging corporate is 7%. You know, financial institutions like lending to NBFC, et cetera, is about 8%. You get the picture now, in fact, of course, it's now 2%. The second point I'd like to leave behind with you is that the bank's advances have become really very diversified.
We also feel very much at peace that no one business can really, the movement or, or behavior in one in any one business does not really significantly alter the credit performance of the bank on overall basis. The third thing that I want to flag to you is the way the deposits are growing. Now, frankly, you know, it's a good, nice credit environment, and I think most banks are now posting really good results. If you see all of the results that came out, I think they're all growing well and NRI is growing well, for, for most banks, so is income and so profits, et cetera. I'd, I'd say, but I think what is...
It's for us, but I think what is really standing out for, for our bank is the way deposits are growing. This is very important actually, because, you know, our bank, as compared to many other organizations, we have, we have to also pay off, you know, legacy liabilities of the infrastructure era that we inherited in the bank, and which, which helped us in our, in our, in our days. As of today, they're rather high cost. Most banks, I'd imagine, will need deposits for growing the loan book and for getting the corresponding SLR CRR. In our case, we need that, plus we need the need to pay off those deposits. The good thing is that deposits are growing.
To give you an idea, our total customer deposits have grown from, you know, INR 38,455 crore on December 31, 2018. That's at the time of merger. Today, it is INR 148,000 crore. That's a growth of INR 110,000 crore in four years. This is something that is, like, really stunning for our bank. The way the deposits are coming, it's coming really very strong. You know, this also does not tell you the full story, because you might argue it's INR 148,000 crore, and it looks good on the face of it. It's a CAGR of 34%-36%. What is more important actually is the composition of this.
Because the composition of the original, you know, INR 38,000 crore we talked about, that had 73% of that was wholesale deposits and 27% was retail. Today, on our INR 148,000 crore of deposits, 77% is retail on, on much larger base, and only 23% is wholesale. You see that what's happened here, that not only the deposit base has grown, just diversified very much in retail, this is really a very, very positive thing. The last thing, again, talking about deposits, is that our now, CASA Deposits are now touching INR 71,000 crore. Again, this is very good for a reason.
If you recollect, when the merger had just happened, we were, since we had a large deposit base, I think something like INR 28,000 crore or so, or a bit more than that, of legacy high cost deposits, where we're paying 9%. For us, 7% looked very inexpensive, so we started paying 7% of savings rates, at that point of time to raise the money. What we did was, along the way, in somewhere in 2021, we dropped that rate, from 7% to 4% for up to INR 10 lakh. That is a big drop to you. I hope everyone will agree.
Like, it's not like 25, 50 basis points, like, 300 basis points straight from 7% to 4%. When we did that, you know, the surprise or surprises are deposits still rise. And also Mansi to help me with the numbers from there, but if I'm not mistaken, something like about 44% or 45% of the growth in retail deposits is still going on. And on the CASA front, the deposits have grown by YOY of 27%.
That's right.
27% growth in year-over-year CASA Deposits in this environment, the money is shifting out of the DEPT to TDS , and that too, after we drop the, you know, our primary bucket, because one to 10 is a primary bucket, almost, you know, most money is lying here. After that is dropped to 4%, is something that is really quite, I don't know what to say. It's looking so good. Our deposits coming really very well. Now, the next thing is about, about what's happening to our asset quality. Just give me a moment. I'm just pulling out my papers here. In terms of asset quality... Yeah, thanks. Sorry.
In terms of asset quality, we, our, you know, we have the retail, rural and SME financing, that is INR 136,000 crore. This is really, very, let me say the larger part of it, and that is going, has a Gross NPA of only 1.53% now. Our Net NPA in the segment is only 0.52%. Our infrastructure financing is still, of course, NPA is quite high, it's 23.27%. The good news is that its book itself has come down to only INR 3,571 crore. All in all, a bank level, you know, NPA has come down to 2.1%, including infra.
If you strip out infra, which is just a legacy book, will go away, it's only a matter of time. Even today, our Gross NPA has come down to only 1.71%, and our Net NPA has come down to 0.44%, again, excluding infra. When you think of our bank, I know all of you look at the headline number of the bank-level NPA, which everybody does, 2.17. You should, because that there's a fact. For a moment, you should strip off infra and see the numbers at 1.7 and 0.44, and this will give you a lot of comfort.
Frankly, at, at the board level in the bank, it gives us also a lot of comfort because we know that there's not much to bother about from here on. The next thing is, of course, is the way our, you know, our SMA is there. Our SMA numbers are really quite good now. Our SMA on the retail front is only 0.85%. So to celebrate that NPA is low is one thing, which it is, but to know that the pipeline leading to NPA, that is, is SMA, which is SMA- 1 plus SMA- 2, which is 31-60 and 60-90 bucket, that is only 0.85, means that the feeder that feeds into NPA is really so low.
We look forward with great confidence about asset quality in the coming quarters also. If I want to step one step back and see what is leading to such a low SMA, then it is actually collection percentages. In collection percentages, we track what is the collection we get in our primary bucket. You know, our industry term uses a few terms, but I don't want to confuse you. The term that we use is zero. That is the current bucket is the bucket we track for collection efficiency, because after all, it's the current bucket that leads to 0-30, and 0-30 leads to 30-60, 30-60 lead to 60-90 and so on. Tell me about the current bucket.
In the current bucket, our collection efficiency is 99.5%. This 99.5%, sometimes people say, "Oh, my God, it's so benign environment, so you must be so good." No, if you go back, you know, in this, in this semester presentation, we've actually given that feel for 24 months in a stretch, and every time it is like in that zone of 94.4, 94.5, 94.6... I'm sorry, 99.4, 99.5, and 99.6%. It is very, very, very stable, rock stable. What is even more interesting about this is that you, you know, you might have noticed that some, some, some, some lenders report the collection percentage is 107%, 105% and all that. We never cross 100.
Why? Because in our calculation, we take only EMIs collectible this month, and we compare that against what is EMI collected this month. Just EMI to EMI this month. We don't take any arrears in these calculations, and we also never take any prepayments in these calculations because that takes the numbers all, all wonky, because, you know, the numbers can go above 100, below 100 and all that. When we exclude arrears, exclude prepayments, our collection continues at 99.5%. That is what is feeding the SMA, and then SMA feeds to NPA, and you know how the, the rest of the drift works. Overall, we, you know, all in all, we feel that our, you know, because our deposits are coming strong, our, our SMA is low and NPA is low, et cetera.
We are actually looking forward to a good, let me say, let me say a good few quarters coming up. In fact, we're feeling more confident for the next quarter and even more confident for the next quarter after that. Almost I wish, I wish we were, we had a time machine, we can jump two quarters and report numbers to you. It's looking, at least from our end, it's looking that good. If you have any concerns or anything like that, please feel free to share with us because we are giving our point of view, because that's what we are seeing from within. And, sometimes we don't, we don't want to get, we don't want to get lost in our voice.
We do request you to be open with us and tell us if you have any concern. I understand we don't have the vintage of, let me say, established players of, let me say, the big four banks, who all have 20, 25, 30 years. You may have a lot more to track for them and feel more comfortable with them, I can understand that. We, but, but we are seeing our numbers, we are feeling pretty good from within. You, you feel free to really ask us any question which you feel is, is important to ask at this stage, so that you can comfort, get the right track, required comfort.
Sir, can we open the question and answer session?
I can check with Sudhanshu, if he wants to, we can open the remarks.
Yeah, thanks, Vaidya. I'll just again, touch upon a few key numbers, while Vaidya has covered a few of them. Some repetition may be there, but let me just call out the key numbers from my perspective.
Try to leave the repetition out.
To start with, I will say the overall balance sheet of the bank grew by 24% on a year-over-year basis to reach INR 249,000 crore. On the, on the lending side, we see a strong growth as well as on the deposit front, as Venya mentioned. Customer deposits grew by 44% on a year-over-year basis. In fact, the growth in retail deposits was higher at 51% on a year-over-year basis. CASA Deposits for us grew at 27% on a year-over-year basis. Even sequentially, the growth was 3% if we adjust for outflow in Q1, which happened from one large corporate government bank account, which we had called out in Q4 2023. Average CASA ratio stood at 46% for Q1 2024.
Average current account deposits increased by 38% during the year, while average CASA increased by 30% on a YOY basis. Term deposits, of course, we saw a faster growth due to overall increase in the interest rates in the system. I would say the growth, even in term deposits, were largely driven by retail. CASA and term deposits, less than INR 5 crore, was at 81% of customer deposits, which points to granularity of deposits. Retail deposits stood at 77% of the total customer deposits. This used to be as low as 27% in merger, as Venya touched upon. We opened 15 branches during the current quarter, thereby taking the branch count to 824 branches. The high cost of legacy borrowing, which would run down in next two-three years, has come down to INR 16,000 crore.
About INR 3-3,005 crore is scheduled for rundown in balance of this year itself. We have given more details around this in the presentation on slide 27. Moving on to the funded assets, it grew by 25% on a YOY basis to reach INR 170,000 crore. I will split this into four segments. One is retail for personal consumption, second is rural financing, third is SME and corporate financing for business purpose, and lastly, the infrastructure segment, which is the rundown book. The retail book, which comprises of mortgages, consumer loans, credit cards, and wheels, grew by 27% on a YOY basis and 6.8% sequentially. We have seen strong growth across all categories, like home loan grew by 31% on a YOY basis.
Wheel segment, which includes two-wheelers and cars, grew by 45% on account of increased distribution. Consumer loans comprising of consumer durables, personal loans and cross sell grew, grew by 15% YOY. Credit card book grew by 68% on a smaller base. The bank has now issued more than 1.7 million cards since the launch in January 2021. Cross spend on credit card increased by 72% on a YOY basis. Moving on to the rural financing book, which primarily helps in meeting the PSL requirements of the bank, that grew by 46% on a yearly basis. Funding to SME for business purposes and corporate segment increased by 24% on a YOY basis. Infrastructure book, which is the last portion, which de-grew by 44% YOY, and is now merely 2.2% of the total funded assets.
We have given more details in slide 46 on the presentation. Moving on to the asset quality, Gross NPA of the bank further improved by 33 bps to 2.17%, and Net NPA improved by another 15 bps to 0.70% during the quarter. PCR gross of technical write-offs stood at 83% at the end of June quarter. Even in the retail, rural, and the SME segment, GNPA improved sequentially by 12 basis points, and Net NPA is down to just now 0.52%. The corporate non-infra book continues to be well provided with a PCR of 99.4%. Gross slippages were lower by 1% and Net slippages were lower by 30% on YOY in absolute basis. Net slippages were lower by 19% even compared to the previous quarter.
The overall standard research structured book as a percentage of total funded and assets, has further reduced to 0.47% as compared to 0.59% last quarter. The bank holds a provision cover of 25% on this book. Also to note, more than 85% of this book is secured in nature. Where they are touched upon the SMA book, position in the, in the retail segment, I would add that even in the corporate book, the ratio of SMA- 1 and 2 is around 0.2%. Moving on to profitability, profit after tax for Q1 increased to INR 765 crores, versus INR 474 crores in Q1, FY 2023. Adjusted for one-time items, which we had called out in Q4, PAT increased sequentially from INR 701 crores to INR 765 crores.
This was largely driven by strong growth in the core operating income. Core operating profit, which is NI plus Fees, excluding trading gains and OpEx, grew by 45% YOY to INR 1,427 crore. On a quarterly annualized basis, the ROA stood at 1.26%. The ROE stood at 11.78% for Q1 2024. ROE was impacted by about 60 basis points during the quarter as compared to Q4 2023, on account of capital infusion, which happened in the last week of March 2023. NIM on an AUM basis, moderated by 8 basis points to 6.33% for Q1 2024. The credit cost on an annualized basis as a percentage of average funded assets, was at 1.16% for Q1, which is well below the earlier guidance of 1.5%.
Moving on to the last section in my opening remarks, the bank has maintained strong capital adequacy, and CAR was at 16.96% at June, with a CET ratio at 13.7%. During the quarter, we raised Tier II of INR 1,500 crore. The bank has maintained an average LCR of 125%. We would like to maintain the same broadly around these levels. Our long-term credit rating but was upgraded by two rating agencies during the quarter, so that was also a positive development for the bank. With this, I, I, I conclude my opening remarks, and we can move on to the Q&A. Thank you.
Thank you, friends. I must make one small confession to you. I just dozed off this, you know, in the last maybe hour or so, just before the con call. Just I woke up and suddenly Sudhanshu said, "Con call is starting." I just hope that whatever we made our opening remarks, I mean, my, Sudhanshu was well prepared, but my opening remarks at least were at least in context. In case there were any gaps in my opening remarks, please excuse and you can fill them up in the course of the conversation. I'm, I'm completely up and running as we speak now.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on the touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. Our first question is from the line of Lalit Deo from Equirus Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good evening, sir. Congratulations on a great set of numbers. Sir, like, I have two questions. Sir, firstly, on the branches side, we have added about 15 branches in this quarter, and now on the competitor side, we are seeing some large private banks getting, becoming aggressive in adding new branches. How are we looking in terms of adding newer branches over the next two-three years?
We'll keep adding as required, maybe 150, in that zone.
like, 150 on an annual basis, like or like, over the next…
Annual annual, maybe, maybe. We, we keep also fluid on this front. Basically, we keep planning our liability requirements. We know that we need, you know, we need to grow the, we are planning at least to grow the balance sheet by 25% odd. 25% odd, meaning that we need INR 40,000 crore on a, on a INR 160,000 crore. If you need INR 100,000 crore, we need INR 40,000 crore, we mean actually INR 50,000 crore of deposits. We only, we will put as many branches as required to roughly take us in that zone. Could be 150, could be 200. We keep ourselves in that window.
We, we don't, we are not putting on any specific number, like, we don't put a specific target on this, because our needs, we just plan it to the requirements, that will be implemented requirements.
Sure, sir. Second question will be on the deposit side. Currently, like, what will be our average cost of deposits, savings account deposits as of now? Like we have recently increased our peak saving rates to 7% in the INR 0.1 crore-INR 50 crore category right now. Like, do we foresee any other further increase in those peak rates?
No, we don't intend to. This is the. If you notice, the biggest difference between this and what we did earlier is that up to INR 10 lakh, we pay only 4%. Really, whether we pay 6.5% or 7% makes no difference to that bucket.
Then, like, what will be our average cost to start saving on deposits as of now?
Average cost of saving deposits is about 5.6%.
Sure, sir. Thank you, sir.
Okay.
Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Rahul Jha, from Bay Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hello?
Yeah, hi.
Hi.
Yeah. Hi, hi, great set of numbers. Congratulations.
Thank you.
My question was on the regards of two things. One, like, see, the profitability has consistently improved over the last, say, six quarters. What next, like, what levers are you trying to pull to get to the next stage? Like, more philosophical and strategic question. The second on the this thing, like, earlier, on the credit card, I think the bank was only offering it to existing customers. Now that you have launched a few co-branded and others, what is the strategy there? Are you open to outside of new to bank and other kinds of customers as well?
Let me take the first thing, first things first. Your profitability, what levers are we pulling? See, frankly, ours is a pretty steady machine. We always maintain that, that our retail, assets return on equity is running upward of 20%. On stock, not on the, not on incremental, on stock, like when we know, when we see our, our earnings minus cost of funds, that kind of stuff. That's, I think, 20% return on equity. As this machinery keeps growing, you know, ROE of the bank will, you know, keep going up now, and this should hopefully stay for there for a while. The second thing is that there are many other levers.
Remember, right in the beginning, I pointed out to you that now the bank is operating in many new lines of business, which are not normally visible to the market. For example, if you take cash management system, it's not visible to you. If you give a home loan or car loan, you can see it in the market. When you give CMS, none of you can touch it on day-to-day. Like that, your cash management is coming up, that's throwing up nice income. Our, our FASTag is throwing up nice income. Our wealth management business, which some select few of you may be experiencing, but that's, that's quite profitable. All of these things are one after the other, beginning to, to, to give income actually to us. FX solutions, for example, trade and FX is a big revenue earner.
We plan to expand revenue on that front quite significantly, you know, where as part of the India, you know, external trade, both imports and exports, that solution. Our services in the branches about the turnaround we give for people who want to import or export, et cetera, I'd say it's, it's, it's okay, is good, but not the best in the market in terms of turnaround. Like, for example, there are things, you know, exporters get their money converted sometimes in our bank in 24 hours. Maybe in some banks, they even get it converted in maybe two hours. When we fix that issue, and we are working on that, then that can be a big revenue generator, generator for the bank. There are many, many lines of business that we are, that is going to fire for the bank.
Thanks. On the second one, please?
The second one is very simple to answer, because in the credit card business, because what we launched initially was the vanilla, vanilla product, which has been quite successful for the bank, because product features are good. you know, the core vanilla feature alone does not meet all needs of a customer. For example, if you give a customer a good APR and a good zero, zero joining fee, zero annual fee, and give a good product-
Mm.
It's good. There are many customers who have needs which are related to travel.
Right.
For them, you know, a co-brand partner brings much more value or brings the value to the card, just like we can. Then the power of the card doubles. Like, for example, the Vistara card we launched recently, so this is also a big success. I can't say big success in terms of stock, but incremental flow demand is quite strong. These are specific needs customers have in the market, and we will just open many more of those co-brands will open in the market for that.
Okay. Would you be open to give customers, say, more than one card if they already have a card? Because now that you have co-branded and other portfolios.
Yeah, well, it depends on the limit we, we're comfortable on a customer level.
Okay. Yeah, thanks, thanks. I will come back in the queue.
Yes.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Nitin Agarwal from Motilal Oswal. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi, thanks for the opportunity. Congrats on a good set of numbers.
Thank you, Nitin.
A couple of questions. One is on the fee income. If I look at the fee income, growth has been running very strong, and the, the fee, as a percentage of total assets also, this number is moving up and has now come up to almost 2.4%. What is really driving this? And I'm curious to know, because, like, a couple of quarter back, Bank launched Zero Fee Banking, wherein you waived off fee for almost 25 banking services. But there somehow seems to be no impact of that. How much, like, fee loss have we experienced because of that waiver?
No, that in many of the things we were not charging earlier also, it didn't make a big delta difference to the bank. Of course, we waived off on quite a few charges. We felt that the fee structure in the Indian system, even, even for us, to the extent that we were charging, were very complicated, actually. You know, and the more we pored on it, we felt the need to abolish it, and that's why we took it off. That is not the key driver. You know, we still have other lines of businesses, so that you just, we can explain there, which, which line is giving how much income.
Yeah, Nitin, we have given details on slide 50. If you see, it's a very diversified pool. In fact, the loan origination fees is coming down on a quarter-on-quarter basis in terms of a proportion that is up now over 30%. The other, I would say, non-capital consuming businesses are also started generating fees, right? Like the toll business, that is giving fees where we have a good market share. Credit card, we know is a good fee enabler, right? That also book is increasing. Between credit card and toll alone, the composition is about 17%. Again, we have been trying to, as we are increasing customers, we are getting more revenues from on the trade front, on the FX front, and so on.
Third-party distribution from our branches, that, and distribution of other products like mutual funds, SIPs and all that, that has been increasing. It's, it's a very diversified pool, right? In fact, if you see that with distribution from third party and wealth management products, that fee has increased by 87% on a YOY basis, right? It's, it's a well-diversified pool, and of course, we have already reached to about 2.3%, 2.4%. We feel that we will be able to maintain a strong momentum even into the future quarters on, on, on these fronts.
Right. Should we, like, how should we really model this then, in terms of growth going ahead? Because the current growth is like 2x, the balance sheet growth. Will this continue to grow the current rate or will it be closer to the balance sheet growth in terms of growth?
We'll have to probably pull through our projects, our own internal projections to be able to answer that. Directionally, let me say that, now the bank has so many lines of business we launched last two or three years. All the names, all the lines we called out, credit card, wealth management, trade, client, FX, all the stuff, whatever, Sudhanshu pointed out, toll. All of these are key businesses. We, we feel there'll be strong growth. There will... Let me just say that if you want to model it, we can say that if balance sheet grows by 25, fee will outstrip it by a margin. Let, let me say that.
Okay, sure. The other question is on margins. Where, where are we on the cost of deposits repricing? Where is it likely to peak? Just therefore, what is the outcome of margins going forward?
We think already peaked. We're not seeing any more increase, and I think we are not finding a need to increase. you know, for example, what we pay 0% to 9%, we pay 4%. We feel there's no need to touch it, because even at these rates, as I mentioned earlier to you, the numbers, the way they're coming in, very, very strong. We don't feel the need to increase it from here. Anyway, looks like also the Indian system is tapering off. Margins should be stable from here.
Okay. Sure.
Sorry, just to add, since the cost in the TD comes with a lag, and I would say a good portion already came into this quarter, there will be some more increase, which we could see, right? But as Vaidya mentioned, NIM should be broadly stable.
Increase in the cost of funds.
Yeah, cost of funds.
Likely.
Yeah, again, I'm saying there is a book which is also linked to MCLR. That also happens, reset happens with certain frequency. Some of these would get offset, but I see NIM to be broadly stable, as Vendya mentioned.
Give or take 10 days, nothing should, things should not be very different. If you go and do your modeling, feel comfortable to peg this approximately where we are today. Also feel comfortable to peg our credit cost pretty low around the lines what already said, because we are, I told you already, hardly, hardly have an SMA, so we don't expect any increase in NP also. Pretty straight line stuff. Just do it in a spreadsheet, you'll get the results for the next quarter or maybe next year.
Sure. Thank you, sir. Thanks so much, and wish you all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Pritesh Bumb from DAM Capital. Please go ahead.
Good evening, sir.
Good evening.
Sir, two questions. basically, some months back, there was an article on, you know, regulator may increase, risk weight assets on retail, especially the unsecured side. We, we having a well-managed retail and secured book as well. What do you see impact on our book? If, if anything comes, how do you mitigate that in terms of strategy?
Well, if, if, if, if there is, our sense is that there's no such real proposal on the table or something like that, but our sense, but, you know, your guess, guess could be as good, as good as mine. The, our sense is that if any such thing comes in the wisdom of the regulator, then it will be good for the system, and, that may be proactive, so that's okay. But, you know, we are, we are running quite strong on capital adequacy at this point of time. Our fundamental business model is generating such low, such high collection percentages of 99.5%, giving us such low SMA, giving us such low NPA, so our fundamental strategy should not change.
If there's slight risk-weight impact, and if it has to be passed on to the customer, it will be passed on also, who knows? If you've got to absorb it, we'll absorb it. We, we'll pay it by the year. See, frankly, we are sitting, we have very strong margin, so these small movements of 10, 20 basis points here or there are not really disturbing us, whether in cost of funds or, or, or any of these line items.
Got it. sir, second question was, generally, what we have seen in the large bank side, whatever disclosures have come in, the lower end of the staff or the employees have a big churn. For a bank which is growing well, strongly, how are you managing that? What are our, you know, churning %, or if you can give some light on that.
Yeah. We have seen that our, we've seen the numbers that have come from others. We probably feel that, in the industry, like, in the industry across the system, the lower-end people who are just joining the bank, doing sales roles, et cetera, their, their attrition will be a little higher, as comfortable environment lesser, and as you go up the chain, even lesser. We've seen our numbers. Our numbers are slightly lesser than what has been reported in the press for other, a few other banks. You could, you could call us somewhere in that zone, but maybe the lower end of that.
Particularly what we've seen is that this year, Q1, it's better than what it was in all of last year, and last year was better than what it was the prior year, in a trendline sense. It's, it's numbers are getting... When we come out with the annual report, we'll put some of these numbers out there. But-
Thank you so much.
Yeah. Short list, trend line is getting better. It's getting better, and we are slightly better than the system numbers we're seeing in the press, in the press.
Got it, sir. Thank you so much for answering.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Ishan Agarwal from Erevna Capital. Please go ahead.
Hello.
Yeah, hi.
Congratulations, to the management again for delivering a good set of numbers.
Thanks so much, Ishan.
Ishan.
My, yeah. My first question is regarding our cost structure. I'm unable to get my head around it. As on date, if we see, we have close to 825 branches with assets worth INR 171,000 crore. Say, I, if I have to name a large private sector bank, say Kotak, they have around 1,800 branches and INR 360,000 crore in advances. Are OPEX, excluding employee expenses, higher than Kotak? It's almost, it's much higher than Kotak on this quarter. Why do we have such a high cost structure? What are the components which lead to such a high cost, even at half the number of branches?
See, you tend to think that branches are costs. Let me just tell you that it is just one part, part of the cost. It, the main cost is the fundamental line of businesses you're in. You, you, you take a bank which is probably doing home loans. Yeah? Ishan, Ishan, right, am I speaking to right now?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ishan, you take a bank which has probably done, you know, has only home loans, only car loans. Obviously, the OpEx will be much lesser for that business. If you take a bank which is doing probably, more of, you know, a lines of businesses that we do, like say durable financing or two-wheelers or used cars or, you know, micro enterprise loans, these are relatively, higher-cost businesses. We do have home loans. Of course, like you pointed out, we have about a INR 20,000 crore home loan book, and we have a INR 20,000 crore loan against property book. But, but, let me say in a proportion sense, let me say the X home loan business for our bank is little higher. That itself is fundamentally a, this one.
That's why we get, we, our yield is much higher, our OpEx is higher. You really, you can't pick only the OpEx number and say that: Oh, my God, our OpEx is higher. What about, what about income? Why don't you compare our income with the other bank and say what...
I'm just saying that when I compare it with the asset, the total asset book, as well as the number of branches. You're correctly saying that number of branches cannot be compared. Even on an advances front...
That's why I'm saying, Ishan, just, just, just hear me out.
Uh-huh.
The point I'm trying to tell you is that composition is different. Let's, let's, let's take three, three cost structures separately. Okay? Let's, so that, that will help you and everybody listening to understand this better. Cost comes, let's take the, the asset lines. Asset lines, like I said, somebody running a, our business lines have a, you know, we are more rural, for example. Rural are more expensive, so our income line is more, OpEx is more.
Hmm.
Other banks may have lesser income, lesser OpEx .
Hmm.
In the end, we will deliver a certain ROE, they will deliver a certain ROE. Our belief is that our ROE is already running 20% plus, okay, on the lending side. Therefore, as I said-... Our combination of income and is higher income or higher OpEx, put it like that. Let's move to liabilities. On the liability side, of course, you know, there is, we are setting up all the branches because you should know that we are a new bank, and we are having to set up a number of, you know, all this infrastructure in a rapid pace. In the last three years alone, we've put up probably close to, like, 650, 700 branches.
670 may not be great, may not be a very big number compared to big banks, but consider it comes from the base of 150, it's like a massive 4x, 4x increase. That's where that cost structure comes. Number three comes in the other businesses, like FASTag or wealth management, et cetera. Those are fee-generating businesses. These are three areas that each line of business for us is looking more expensive because we are starting off from a zero base and building a bank, while the other banks may be already built for 20, 30 years.
May I request, management, we move to the next participant? Participant-
No, let the person answer if he comes up, if he was not satisfied, he can.
The line for the participant has dropped, sir.
Okay, no problem. Basically, just to finish the, just to conclude, one is the lines of one is the stage of institution, we talked about it. The our stage is new, so no, no one, no listener, no one should forget that. Our stage is new. We are five years old, others are 25, 30 years old. The second thing is that even for what, even for our bank, apart from the fact, apart from the factors we talked about earlier, there are a number of OpEx which you take for granted in an, rather, number of builds, which you take for granted in an established institution. For a new institution, someone has to pay to build it. For example, let us say that you are giving, you know, a cash management solutions today.
We are building it up. It's our OpEx today. Someone who built it 15 years ago, for them, it's OpEx already built. Today, they're only earning income out of that. Think of anything. If you want to build a mobile app, we are building a mobile app today. Someone who built it 10 years ago is just reaping the income out of that today. A new bank will go through all the set of expenses. I think it can't be avoided, because we're building the bank for the long run. We take it as part of our, our, our, it is our karma to do it at this stage. Yeah.
Thank you, sir. We move to our next question. That is from the line of Sagar Shah from PhillipCapital. Please go ahead with your question.
Good evening, sir. Thank you so much, for the opportunity.
Hi.
First of all, congratulations for another great quarter. Now, I just have some few questions. My first question was on the general on the demand front, especially on all of our segments, actually. Now, almost we are seeing the almost the peak of interest rates. Now, I wanted to understand the general nature on ground that how actually customers are actually absorbing these, are they being able to absorb the hike in rates, or are they able to absorb the increased interest rates? Because of that, what is the actually effects of that?
That, the, going ahead, will we see some increase or decrease in, demand for, loans, especially on the retail front this year and next year, or, or you're, you're seeing that, customers are, easily, are being able to easily absorb the interest rate hike? My first question is that.
Yes, Sagar, maybe I'll, I'll take in that. Thanks for the question. As I said, we are seeing a very strong demand, right, across all products, right? Of course, in, in some products, we are also able to increase our market share. I would say in terms of customer's ability, the proof of the pudding is the numbers which we are seeing in our SMA and, and that kind of a buildup, right? I think the rates is not, has not much of an impact, in terms of, in, in terms of demand, the customer ability to pay, and so on, right? So I feel... In fact, if you go and check the rate increase which has happened, still, I would say even after the increase, the rates are, have reached pre-COVID, right? I think, we are quite, we feel quite comfortable in the, in terms of the growth which can come in for the bank, and, we don't see this as a concern at all.
See, I'll tell you what.
So-
If you notice.
Yes.
By the way, it is a very good question, by the way, what you asked, saying that: Look, interest rates have gone up. How are customers coping with this, right? That's a short question. That's the point.
Yes, sir.
The thing is that, I think when lenders are lending to people, they are keeping cushion. No one is lending to the customer to the brim. Let me give you an example. If suppose customer is, he has, say, INR 1 lakh in the, in the bank as a cash flow.
Mm-hmm.
For the EMI, the bank has calculated that the bank now reverse calculates, saying that, "Okay, the customer on an average, keeps INR 1 lakh in the bank on the first to seventh of the month. Let me give the customer a loan, where the EMI is INR 50,000." Okay? Now, he gave, computed INR 50,000, and he gave the loan. Customer is paying back very well. Now, if you say that interest rates have gone up, the customer's affordability has come down, but remember, there was still already a cushion of INR 50,000. In that example, they had a cushion of INR 50,000 already. Now, even if we add a little bit of the cushion, customers are still honoring.
At least we are finding that 99.5% collection we are getting, we are getting for 24 months, interest rates are high, interest rates are low. I think it's probably because of the cushions my lenders are keeping with the lending. Also one important thing, by the way, Sagar, to also note that lenders are always lending at a point of time of assessing a customer today. With growth of GDP, suppose we lent to somebody two years ago-
Mm.
The interim GDP grows on a nominal basis by 12%, and the customer's income probably is around the 12%. That also adds to the question actually. I'm, I'm, I'm guessing that's the reason, at least that, that could be the reason why this collection percentage continues to look good.
Hmm. Yeah, certainly looks by the numbers, sir. Certainly, I agree that your numbers are quite robust in terms of asset quality, but, but my concern was related to the recent hike in interest rates. What is the effect on them? That's okay, I got your point. My second question is related to your loan against property. Your loan against property segment has actually has almost remained flat quarter-on-quarter. Are we facing competition or have, have we actually stopped disbursing in this segment? Are we any reasons for the same?
Not really. I mean, sometimes, you know, it could be... I think we also sold on a small part of the book, actually.
Oh.
That, that also brought down the numbers at this time.
Okay, okay, sure. Now, my, just, around just a bookkeeping question, actually related to, I wanted the slippages number and the write-offs number for this quarter, and another, I wanted the floating provisions for this quarter, sir. How much are you holding in your balance sheet?
Yeah, we don't keep floating provisions and all, but we do, the, the no- normal credit cost is 1.2%. Maybe Sudhanshu can tell you the number.
Hmm.
Yeah. Slippages, I, I, as I mentioned in the opening remarks, though that has come off, in fact, net slippage is down by 30% on a YOY basis, even sequentially.
Mm.
-it's down by about 20%. In absolute terms, that net slippage number is about INR 380 crores for the quarter.
If you annualize that, that would be not very much. It's quite comfortable.
Okay. What, what are the write-offs for this quarter? How much have you written off in this quarter?
We don't call out that number specifically, but, in, in our Pillar 3 disclosures, we will, you will get that number in due course.
More than that, See, end of the day, just to get the technicalities out of the way so that you don't, you are clear about the provision versus write-off issue. What hits a bank's P&L? What hits a bank's P&L? Provisions.
Provisions.
That's it. After provisions, you write off at a particular stage, whether, whether some, some people write off the 360, some people over 540, some people write off whenever. How much you write off, when, when you write off is not the material thing, what you provide. What, what we are providing is costing us about 1.2% on a credit cost basis.
Yeah, 1.16 for this quarter.
1.16% for the quarter. You, you should model that in your math. Of course, we guide for 1.5% and all that, but right now it's coming much lesser than that. Income minus OpEx, minus that amount of provisions that we will take, will be our P&L. When we write off is a matter of technicality.
Okay. Okay. Fair point, sir. Fair point. Thank you so much. All the best for the future.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Ritika from Ocean Dial. Please go ahead with your question.
Sir, thank you for the opportunity, and congrats on the great set of numbers. I have two,three questions. One, I would again request you to maybe share some of your thoughts on the industry growth. You know, it's been, you know, basic after coming off a low base and... but it's been quite some quarters, and the growth remains, very healthy for the sector. What as for you is like, you know, the key to the same? The other surprising thing is that it's like across board, it's not just obviously a couple of, banks. It's like every banker is showing, you know, the superlative number on a quarter on quarter basis. That's one. Secondly, you know, you've been consistently showing good numbers, in the profitability side.
How should we really see, any guidance on that front as we look forward to, maybe by the end of FY 2024, how do you look the ROAs it should settle, or if you want to give a little more longer, could also be fine. Thirdly, you did answer on the lab bit, but I would still maybe want to still maybe check your thoughts again on the strategy on the mortgage fee, including both, home loan and lab. Thank you, sir.
No, thanks. All, all, all very good questions. The last one is easy to answer, because see, frankly, this mortgage and home loans will grow forever and ever and ever. There is no end to that growth in the, in this country, and we will keep growing it. So that's easy one. Now, with regard to industry growth, well, just, just what is happening we see is that there is a lot of business that is getting opened up in the, in the, in the small and medium enterprises business and in the retail business, because the Indian ecosystem has opened up, has become more conducive to organized lending. If you notice, all banks are basically by nature, conservative lenders, and the, the, and nobody wants to take undue risk.
What is happening is that because of the opening of the cash flow, evaluation tools have become much more better, because now most people are now doing transactions through the bank account, which is not so earlier. When people are doing transaction in bank account, we are able to see their transaction trails or GST trails. With these trails, people are able to lend. This by itself opened up the market to organize lending. Third thing is that the control systems have, you know, very much improved. For example, earlier we used to do collections by calling customers, or if somebody skipped an installment and, or maybe sent an agent to the customer's home to pick up the money.
These days, we are simply sending a UPI link, and then the customer is paying an UPI link. No agent doesn't need to go only in, in many cases. I'm saying the whole ecosystem, whether we're originating, evaluation, collection, monitoring, everything has become more conducive and feels more safe now because of availability of data and tools and all that. That could be one reason why, you know, you're beginning to see growth, I guess, with, with, with everybody. One was your question on what will we do with mortgage? Like I told you, it'll grow. Second, your question on why growth is coming. What is the third question? You had one more question.
Sir, it was on the ROA trajectory, because you are already at, like, 1.26 or the top.
See, now, we clearly feel that ROA will stay, you know, healthy now. I don't think we're going to dip on this front, because, the very important thing that we called out right from the beginning, since 2018, is that we only focus- we've only focused and tell the market what we are truly doing on the core income. We don't try to put, you know, some- take some cute advantage of what happened in treasury markets and all that. Since the core operating income is now touching, like, INR 1,450 crore, correct, Sanjeev?
INR 14 crores andINR 27 crores.
INR 41,427 crore core, by the way. No, no, which is sustainable number every quarter from here on. That number itself was so strong. Minus credit cost numbers, we told you, we should be comfortably above 1% for, you know, for, for a long, long time, probably increase from here. If you take a, let me not talk about next quarter and all. I told you we're feeling quite confident about even second quarter, third quarter, fourth quarter, et cetera. You take a two-year, you know, we feel that pretty much a straight line model, at least this, you know, one odd quarter, sometime, in an odd quarter, ROA can come down by two, three basis points, can go by two, three basis points.
You should not expect that every single quarter for lifetime, this will keep on increasing. These things don't work like that, and odd things happen. If you take a year by year by year measure, definitely you should see 2024 should be better than 2023, 2025 should be better than 2024, 2026 should be better than 2025. That is something you should expect from us.
Sure, sir. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Sonal Minhas from Prescient Capital Investment Advisors LLP. Please go ahead.
Hi, there. This is Sonal Minhas. I hope I'm audible.
Yes, Sonal.
Hi, there. Sir, I wanted to get a bit of a broader macro understanding around the CASA in the market. We've seen the results of couple of banks, and it almost seems like at a broader level, the CASA is right up. You mentioned in your notes that it's linked to intra-stage. Just wanted to understand from your perspective and how you are seeing the market, your take on CASA and what is it happening in the market? That's my first question.
The CASA has come from two things. It comes from the ability to provide solutions to customers, especially current accounts.
Mm-hmm.
it's not about. Because everybody is saying zero, then what, what are you going to compete?
Mm.
Therefore, the, and it's not even about rate, it's about what solutions you give the customer. That is why you'll find all the large existing banks who have been around for 20, 30 years, they have tied up the entire solutions for clients, end-to-end in a supply chain, for example, or end-to-end in a Government banking business. You know, right from the time the money is released from the Government of India, to the last paisa, there is a chain of flow that happens.
Mm.
It takes time to build these things. Once you build the solutions, we start getting quite a, a lot of annuity income. Basically, you start getting annuity flows, you get started getting annuity income. Therefore, when you think of it like that, our bank has, I really believe we have terrific opportunity because we're a new bank, we're a good tech bank. The, our ability to build all those solutions, end-to-end supply chain solutions, is very good. Therefore, when we build the solution, we're already making good headway. Not great, I'd say, not, not as good as it should, should be for, for a, for a well-developed bank. We are still very low on CASA, we are making very good progress on this front. That's on the CASA front.
On the SA front, that market is a bit different because SA is a bit of, it's a very, it's a very service-oriented business.
Mm.
We are paying 4%, but money's, like, flowing in like crazy now into a bank on, on the deposit front. When we are paying only 4% up to INR 10 lakh, why is money coming to us like this? I'd imagine brand. Definitely, when you become a brand, that's a very crucial moment in an institution's life. When you become a good brand, it's, money comes, start coming in. Then service levels. You know, we, we get very, I, I rarely get upset about anything, but the one thing I get personally very upset is if a customer, some, some customers have been dealt very badly or anything like that, and, you know, there's some systemic issue with the bank. We go really, we take customer service very, very seriously, and we try to offer high quality service to customers.
Let me just say brand, service, even pricing to an extent, all of these things combine to give a good star balance. At least in our case, size coming from other banks, obviously, we are not obviously growing at 40%, it's not that India is growing at 40. It's coming to us from somewhere. I think it's coming because of brand. I'd say one of the factors is brand.
You expect the trend to go continue, like, the way it is?
Yeah. Yeah.
That should not?
Yes, we feel so. At least for us, we don't feel. We feel very confident for the upcoming three, four, five quarters. We should expect that our deposit, our liabilities and deposits should be 40, 45, 40, 45. We should continue to report numbers in this zone. We, we will. I, I'm pretty confident about it, because that's how we're seeing flow in our branches right now. You know what? There is something that is interesting with the brand. You know, brand is just not being that, Oh, my God! People know about a brand. It's not about knowing.
The brand quality.
No, no, no. Not the quality. Quality I talked about already. I'm gonna say something different. See, the one thing is the brand thing that, do people know your brand? Obviously, our brand is much less known than a, say, an ICICI Bank or an HDFC Bank or a, any of those banks. Obviously it is so. That's fine, but that's the reality of our life stage at this point of time. Question is, even among people who know, what do they think of you? This is very important. That's where the brand character comes. They may think of, you know, if you take out the top four banks, let me say ICICI, HDFC, Axis, Kotak, who are all very well-known banks and great banks.
If you see the next tier banks, that is say our bank, Bandhan, IndusInd, Yes Bank, et cetera. Now, let me say that we are, we call our, we are a mid-tier bank in that, in that, family of banks. Now, even among these banks, you cannot say that all customers think the same thing about all these four banks. They may be similarly known, but we are, people just think, fortunately, quite well about our bank. What people think about us and whether they know us are two separate things, actually.
That's exactly, that's I think the, the longer term, the, as you said, that, that gets built up over time.
That is over time, but somehow we are enjoying that image. How it comes, I don't know, but we are enjoying that image, and money just come to us. Whenever you go to any location, open a branch, boom! One, one flush of cash comes to the bank straight away.
Got it, sir. Sir, my second question is linked to the credit card business. It's a smallish business which is going fairly well. Just wanted to understand if you could disclose broadly, what is the credit cost, we working in that particular business? Just to understand, because I think there's not too much of a disclosure, which is understandable. Broadly, if you could just guide a little bit on credit costs in that business, that will help understand, where are we heading in that business.
We should expect a really good return on equity in the business. I have personally done that business for close to over 20-25 years now. My colleague, Madhivanan, has done, done that business for forever, and he's pretty much a master at that business. You know, under him, he has a colleague called Shirish Bhandari, who's also done the business for long. We are a bunch, set of people who know the business really very well. And, and of course, there's people in it. We are very confident of that business. And we believe the return on equity and credit card business will exceed 24%-25%, as and when it comes, whenever it comes of age.
You know, if you want to understand truly the credit card business economics, you know, stripped down business end to end, you take to the, take the listed company, SBI Cards. I mean, it's, it's a monoline credit card financing business. See the economics.
Mm.
There's no reason-
They, they have a credit cost of 6.5%. That's why I was just trying to benchmark that.
That, no, no, no, that's a little high.
Yeah.
You know, we have lent largely credit cards to our existing customers at this point of time.
Mm-hmm.
People who are savings account with us and all. We don't, you know, NPA, I think I put out an NPA numbers in the investor presentation somewhere. Gross is some 1.7 or something, net is some 0.2, 0.3 or 0.4, something like that. We don't have a, we are not in those kind of numbers of credit costs. Still, if you understand the economics of that business, just look at the SBI Credit Card. They're doing a wonderful job and you see the economics there.
Thank you.
Are we done, folks? I thought we've spent quite some time. It's quarter to seven.
Sir, we have a question from the line of Mr. Jai Mundhra from ICICI Securities.
Okay. Can we take that as the last question, Jai?
Yes, sir. Hi, this would be the last question, sir. I wanted to check, sir, now that asset quality outcomes have been much better, and as you said that, you know, we have been following a very, let's say, robust process, which is giving us the confidence of that asset quality should remain benign. In that context, sir, would you like to sort of accelerate the loan growth from current 25% level, which is what we are reporting, or you think this, this kind of a level of loan growth is, you know, commensurate to kind of asset quality outcomes that we are seeing? What I wanted to check is, are the better operating environment would help you to push the pedal on growth, or you think this is a fine balance as of now?
See, we should be very careful here, because, you know, like, RBI always says, and even governor also says.
Ladies and gentlemen, the line for the management has disconnected. Please stay online while we reconnect them. Thank you. We have the management line-
Sorry.
reconnected. You can go ahead, sir.
Yeah, sorry. I think I'm cut off. I said, I don't know which portion you heard me, so let me start again. I said that we should be very careful here. Of course, like I said, the enabling environment has become much better today than before. You know, we have one fetish in our organization that, you know, we have a 12-year record, that our Gross NPA is low, Net NPA low, it gives us a lot of confidence to do to continue to do the business. We would hate it if that moved up even, you know, 10, 20 basis points to the in the wrong side. That's very important that for us, our Gross NPA stays around 1.7-ish or so, and next stays around 0.4, 0.5. Very important to us.
Number two, we won't want to, we, we don't want to test the limits on that front. Second thing is that for us to grow, we tell ourselves internally all the time that we don't need to relax norms at all. At all. Just you don't have to do it. We are such, relatively such a small player, in the market, that if you want to do some more business, all you need is just, you know, in the same city, just add some more distribution points, just add one more city, just add, add one more business line, like we just launched gold loans recently or education loans. Just add one thing more, and boom! You get volumes. We, we don't need to grow anything more.
To give you guidance on the, lastly, on the question on that, you said, "Can we go beyond 25?" Let me answer that very specifically. Thus far, for the last three or four years, what you've been seeing is that the wholesale co- is coming down, infrastructure is coming down, and that, and retail is growing greater than 25. Blend, blend time is going to 25. Let me say that a couple of years from now, the, the degrowth in infrastructure will stop because it can't go below zero, and it'll head towards there. Even then, we like to grow the balance sheet only at 20, 25. Let me say 23, 25. Which means that the retail growth itself will taper down towards that number.
Today, retail is growing more than 25, wholesale is you know, growing less than 25, blend is 25. Let me say in a couple of years, retail is going to grow only at 25. If you keep it at 25, 25, it can go for a long time. We don't need to disturb that, that, that, that... We don't need to grow faster than that.
Sure. Thank you, sir.
Even if you grow something at 23, 24 for a long time, over eight years, 10 years, 15 years, that it's a pretty good compounding story. Why grow faster than that?
Sure. Thank you, sir.
Thank you. Due to time constraint, that was the last question of our question and answer session. I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
No, I have no closing comments to make. I want to just thank all of you. Sudhanshu, you want to say anything?
Yeah, thank you, everyone. Thanks for patient hearing. Have a great weekend.
All, all we can say is that you've been with us even in our, let me say, harder days. Now we probably have a little more happier moment coming our way. If you, if you watch our story for the next two or threene years, even though, even those who are not convinced, you know, bit by bit, you'll, you'll be, you'll, you'll get more comfortable with us. That's all I can say. Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
On behalf of ICICI Securities, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.