Motilal Oswal studio. I'm Ritu Singh. Now, HDFC Bank's fourth quarter numbers beat street estimates with profits up about 6.7% and net interest income up 10.3% over the previous year. Asset quality improved while the net interest margins on total assets came in at a seven quarter high. Abhishek Kotari is joining in with the numbers.
Well, HDFC Bank reported its Q4 FY25 numbers. The numbers were strong, especially on the core operating profit growth which was up more than 20% year-on-year and about 4.9% on a sequential basis. So take a look at the net interest margin on total assets. It's at a seven quarter high of about 3.54% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Now this has a one-off of about 7 to 8 basis points with respect to net interest margin. So even then it comes down to 3.46% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Analysts were estimating a decline in net interest margin. However, they have expanded without including even the one-off income over there. Take a look at the cost to income ratio. It's at a four quarter low of 39.8% versus 40.6% in the previous quarter. The annualized quarterly slippage ratio is at a five quarter low coming in at 1.15% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. Overall, the slippages have declined nearly 15% on a quarter-on-quarter basis which is heartening to see. Their asset quality remains impeccable and continues to improve with one of the best in the industry. A gross NPA ratio is at 1.3% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. The net NPA ratio has also declined by three basis points on a sequential basis. The other key highlights being the net interest income growth is about 10.3% year-on-year and about 4.6% sequentially. They have been able to command better because the loan growth is at just 5.5% year-on-year and about 4% sequentially. The OPEX has remained under control for them which has helped the operating profit growth. OPEX have declined by 2.3% year-on-year and grown by only 2.6% quarter-on-quarter. Overall, the provisions are down 76.5% year-on-year but they have increased by just 1.2% sequentially. So PAT is a growth of 6.7% year-on-year and about 5.3% quarter-on-quarter overall. Good sense, good numbers coming in from HDFC Bank especially on the core operating profit growth. Back to you.
Well, the other big lender ICICI Bank reported a mixed set of numbers with business momentum slowing down while profitability was above street estimates. Abhishek, tell us more on that front.
Mixed set of numbers coming in from ICICI Bank. Weak with respect to business momentum that you are seeing for them while the P&L continues to remain strong for them. Take a look at the deposit growth: 14% year-on-year and about 5.9% sequentially. Year-on-year, it's the weakest deposit growth that you are seeing in last eight quarters. Now advances growth is at 13.3% year-on-year and just 2.1% quarter-on-quarter. So year-on-year, this 13.3% growth is the weakest that you are seeing in last 17 quarters and sequentially it's one of the weakest loan growth that you are seeing in last 15 quarters. So loan growth remains very weak for them compared to their historical numbers. The net interest margin is at a five quarter high of 4.41% versus 4.25%. The core operating profit growth is at a five quarter high of 13.7% year-on-year and 5.5% sequentially. The quarterly annualized slippage ratio, that's heartening to see. It's a 17 quarter low of 1.5% versus 1.85% in the previous quarter. Their asset quality continues to improve and remains one of the best that you are seeing in last 10 years or even more. Gross NPA ratio down to 1.67% versus 1.96% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio down to 0.39% versus 0.42% in the previous quarter. So asset quality and P&L gets a thumbs up while weak business momentum or weak loan growth actually impacts the balance sheet. Back to you.
All right. And finally, Yes Bank also reported its fourth quarter numbers where net profits saw a 63% rise on a year-on-year basis. Take us through the details, Abhishek.
Well, control over cost of funds has actually held the net interest margin and the P&L of Yes Bank in this quarter. So take a look at the P&L versus Apollo. The NII has a beat of 4.3% while the PAT beat is about 23.5%. Net interest margin is at an eight quarter high of 2.5%. The loan growth is very weak, one of the weakest that you are seeing in last seven quarters, just 8.1% year-on-year and about 0.55% sequentially. The securities receipts are now nil, so basically they are now zero. Other income has also aided the topline growth for them. So other income is up 15% quarter-on-quarter as fee income is up 21.5% on a sequential basis. So overall the loan growth was weak but they made up in the fees. Fee income was very strong for them. So cost to income ratio hence is at the lowest in last 15 quarters coming in at 67.3% versus 71.1% in the previous quarter as OPEX has declined by more than 4% year-on-year. Annualized slippage ratio is at a 10 quarter low coming in at less than 2%, 1.99% versus 2.2% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio is one of the lowest that you are seeing in last 8 years or even more. Net NPA ratio is now down to 0.3% versus 0.5% in the previous quarter. Quarterly annualized credit cost is at a four quarter high of 1.48% versus 1.26% in the previous quarter. Looks like there might have been a bit of write-off which caught provisioning this time around. Return ratios, they are one of the best for the bank in last 25 quarters but one of the weakest when you see with respect to peers are performing because return ratios continues to remain tepid when compared to peers but one of the best in 25 quarters. ROA at 7% versus 6% in the previous quarter. ROE at 6.2% when compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter.
Thanks very much. Let's cut across to HDFC Bank's earnings con-call being addressed by their CFO, Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
Srinivasan Vaidyanathan
5:48 ↗
Driven by favorable monsoon and increased Rabi sowing, well for strong agricultural performance. This would be further supported by gradually improving manufacturing sector and steady service sector output. Getting to as we look forward for FY26, we expect GDP growth to sustain, supported by pick up in rural spending, discretionary consumer demand, investment activity and multiplier effect of the income tax reduction and RBI repo cut boost to aggregate demand along with providing durable liquidity to the system. We acknowledge that the global macro environment outlook has become more uncertain due to the recent tariff related measures and volatility surrounding them. This may potentially impact global inflation leading to lower growth across economies. As we see it, corporates have adopted a wait and watch stance as we're waiting for more clarity. We remain watchful in this area.
Getting to the deposits. Robust deposit franchise powered by vast distribution strength and strong 97 million customer relationships has grown our deposits to 27.1 trillion. 1.5 trillion growth in the quarter, 5.9% or 3.3 trillion in 12 months period last year, growing at a rate of 14.1%. On an average basis on the deposits, we've seen growth of 15.8% year-on-year. Savings deposits also grew by 249 billion or 4.1% sequentially. Overall CASA deposits entered the quarter at 9.4 trillion, growth of 0.7 trillion in the quarter, resulting in CASA ratio of 34.8% compared to 34% in December. Term deposit aggregating to rupees 17.7 trillion as of March end, 0.8 trillion or 4.7% during the quarter and 3 trillion rupees or 20.3% year-on-year. On the branch network, we added 312 branches during the quarter and 717 branches over the past 12 months. We added 1.8 million new liability relationships.
We worked on rebalancing the funding profile with better mix of deposits and lowering borrowing resulting in a CD ratio of 96.5% coming down from 104.4% in prior year. Borrowing mix is now at 14% of total liabilities versus 18% at the end of prior year. In terms of loans, assets advances under management as of March end at 27.7%, grew by 0.9 trillion or 3.3% during the quarter and 2 trillion rupees over the prior year on an average AUM growth of 7.3% year-over-year.
Getting to capital strength. Our capital adequacy ratio is 19.6% with the CET1 at 17.2% and balance sheet remains resilient with an average LCR of about 119%. Strong revenues with the resilient NIM. Revenues were at 441 billion for the quarter and for the year at 1,683 billion. Net interest margin remained in a rangebound and grew by 10% over prior year at 321 billion. The margin on reported basis was 3.54% and on a core basis 3.46%. On an interest earning asset basis, the reported margin was at 3.73%.
Now getting to operating expenses. For the quarter, operating expenses at 176 billion, up by 2.6% over prior quarter. Expenses remained best-in-class at 1.9% of total assets and cost to income was at 39.8%. Getting to credit, asset quality is a key strength and a differentiator and it remains pristine. The GNPA ratio was at 1.33% as compared to 1.42% in prior quarter. GNPA ratio excluding NPS in agricultural segment was 1.13% prior quarter 1.19%.
Now getting to the total provisions were at about 32 billion and for the quarter prior quarter was also at about 32 billion. The total provisions coverage was at 68%. Total provisions coverage excluding agriculture was at 71%. Stock of provisions, contingent and floating provisions were approximately rupees 259 billion, contingent at 135 billion and floating provisions at 124 billion. General provisions were 109 billion. Total provisions comprising specific, floating, contingent and general were about 172% of gross non-performing loans. This is in addition to securities held as collateral in several of the cases. The annualized credit cost ratio for the quarter was at 48 basis points. Prior quarter was at 50 basis points.
Net profit after tax for the quarter was 176 billion and net profit after tax for the full year was 673 billion and grew by 10.7% over prior year. Now getting to the closing, as liquidity and economic growth improves, we are well placed to grow both in deposits and loans. Deposits as I mentioned grew 15.8% over prior year and loans momentum as seen in the sequential growth was at 3.3% sequential growth which works to about the annualized rate of about 12 to 13%. This delivers a return on asset in the quarter about 1.94% and return on equity of about 14.4%. The earnings per share in the quarter, quarterly earnings per share 23 rupees at the bank standalone level and 24.6 rupees at consolidated bank level. The book value per share on a standalone bank is rupees 655 and at the consolidated bank is at about rupees 681.9. I do want to point out to the dividend that has been recommended. The board of directors recommended a dividend of rupees 22 per equity share of rupees 1 for the year ended March 31, 2025. This will be subject to the approval of shareholders at the ensuing annual meeting. Thank you. Thanks to our employees for the remarkable performance. With that, may I request the operator to open up the line for questions.
All right. That was the HDFC Bank CFO on the bank's fourth quarter numbers that beat estimates on both the top line and the bottom line. On that note, we're going to have to slip into a short break but don't go anywhere. We're back in just a moment with more news and updates.
Welcome back. Now on to some more earnings. Infosys missed estimates in the fourth quarter. Dollar revenue growth contracted by 4% forcing the company to miss its full year growth guidance. The IT major is also expecting growth to remain subdued in the entire financial year. Remma Tendulkar is here with the fine print of the Infosys numbers.
Thanks so much for that. So let me give you the key points from Infy's numbers. One, for the March quarter, a big revenue miss. The company's topline has declined by 3.5% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, lower than street expectations. The good part is the company is giving us a guidance. They are saying in FY26 revenue growth will be 0 to 3%, slightly lower than the 1 to 4% that the street analysts were hoping for. But you know, the environment is uncertain. But the management did say that at the lower end of the guidance which is 0%, they are baking in some deterioration in the macro. At the upper end, that's 3%, they're assuming the macros remain stable or slight improvement. Margin guidance remains unchanged at 20 to 22%. But back to Q4 now. Q4 was very weak for the company at least in terms of the top line at minus 3.5% revenue growth. It's also lower than peers and because of that the company has missed achieving its FY25 guidance. They end FY25 with a topline growth of 4.2% lower than the 4.5 to 5% that they guided for. That said, their margin defense has been strong. The company's EBIT margins were at 21%, very modest decline on a sequential basis but considering the negative topline growth, it's a strong performance on the margin front. Deal wins too have inched up by 4-5% on a sequential basis at $2.6 billion. So on the whole, it's a muted Q4. The guidance is slightly lower than street expectations but the guidance shouldn't come as a surprise based on the commentary that we've heard from the management and the street will take comfort from the deal wins and even the margin performance.
All right, Remma, we leave it at that. Thanks very much for joining in. Now while addressing the media earlier, the Infosys CEO and MD Salil Parekh commented on deal wins made by the company and how that is expected to roll out despite the looming uncertainty. Take a look.
In terms of mega deals, we had two mega deals in the last financial year. We have a pipeline of mega deals today. What is sort of what we saw in the past when things of this nature happened, which is changes in the environment, there's also an interest with clients on cost takeout, automation and efficiency and consolidation. We will see how it plays out because it's only a few days as clients have looked at it but we have seen large deals moving in which we have closed moving into the next phases as was evident.
Now IndiGo is aiming to increase its international capacity to 40% this year, says CEO Peter Elbers. Now speaking to Shireen Bhan, Elbers welcomed a grievance redressal body for customers on airfares but he also called for correlation between the cost of doing business and airfares. Now the IndiGo CEO also warned about the rising airport fee saying it runs the risk of tipping over. Take a look.
The IndiGo international network chain is started some years back, very traditional if you wish between India and the Gulf and the Middle East countries. We've been slowly expanding that. So in '23 we started flights into Central Asia. We started flights into Nairobi. We have moved and I had a meeting earlier this week with the CEO of Changi airport. We moved from moving into Singapore from three Indian cities to nine today. So but that's still within that 5 to 6 hour radius. I think the next step for IndiGo is to make sure that even Europe and further parts of Asia would be accessible directly operated by IndiGo. And you know, if India is going to be the third largest economy in the world by '27, the country needs and deserves actually an airline of the size and scale and potential of the nation.
We've once again seen the parliamentary panel recommend the possibility of looking at intervening in the market as far as prices are concerned. We've now got the government setting up a special cell where customers can actually talk about their complaints as far as pricing is concerned. Would you worry about the possibility of government intervention on pricing at this point in time when there's a body where customers can complain about certain things?
I think that's a good thing. There's always good for companies to have a body which keeps sort of things in balance and things. So I think in general to have a body like that is a good thing. Having said that, looking at the Indian market, it's one of the most, if not the most competitive market in the world. The average price levels are extremely competitive. There has been some recent reports which made a comparison how did inflation go over the years and how did airfares go and actually you could see that the inflation has gone much much faster than the airfare. So we need to catch up in that in efficiency and sort of in order to keep the margins because in the long run there must be a correlation between the cost of doing business and the price of airfares, right? Otherwise you'll be out of business.
Looking at the price sensitivity, a few hundred of rupees sometimes is enough to have people flying or not flying. So we should be mindful of looking how these user fees will eventually find their way into ticket prices because at the end of the day there's a correlation between what is the price and the cost price of a product and what is the price for the consumer eventually.
So full support for all the changes. I think it's important that it's being done but we should be mindful that you know at the end of the day the price of the ticket is based on different elements and this aspect is an important part of that and that should be in line with it. Is it in line with what you believe is the kind of threshold or do you believe it's tipped over? I think at some points it runs the risk of tipping over. You know, if you take the price of a ticket, the price of some of the UDF should in terms of percentage and correlation should be not too much as a total price of the ticket, right? There's still going to be fuel and flying and this and that and the other. So I think again full support for all the changes we're making but we should be mindful of what would it do eventually for the total ticket prices.
All right. Now OpenAI has launched new AI reasoning models o3 and o4-mini products which are developer focused with an improvement in coding abilities. Now ChatGPT is also gaining immense traction in India with users tripling in 2024 to become OpenAI's second largest global market. Now as part of our global dialogue series, CNBC TV18's Shireen Bhan spoke with Kevin Weil, the chief product officer at OpenAI to discuss their plans for the Indian market and the Ghibli image generation tool which has gone viral in the country. Take a look.
Let me start by asking you, Kevin, to give us a snapshot in very simple language. What does ChatGPT 4.1 mean for OpenAI and for consumers and how do o3 and o4-mini change the game?
Yeah, well first of all thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here with you. India is an incredibly important market for OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's our second largest market. It's our fastest growing market and it's also the market where we saw our image generation just take off. But we had some great launches this week. You mentioned GPT-4.1 which was a model for developers that is fantastic at coding and complex instruction following. And so you know, for that, that was a model that we released focused on developers and we're seeing them, you know, we have over 3 million developers on the OpenAI platform and they're doing amazing things. That is one of our fastest growing models by usage ever. And then just this morning in the US we launched o3 and o4-mini which are our frontier reasoning models. They're the smartest, fastest, safest models that we have ever launched. They're incredible at things like computer programming. So if you look at measures like on competitive coding benchmarks, these models would be better at competitive coding than all but about 200 people in the world. And they can answer hard PhD level science questions better than 80% of PhDs in their field across all fields simultaneously. So they're really very intelligent models but you can also use them for more mundane tasks, understanding medical jargon or looking at what's happening in the world, creating images, helping you with writing, translating languages. You know, these models are so dynamic and we're super excited to see what people can do with them.
Let's talk about what you're seeing in India. You talked about how it is today your fastest growing market for ChatGPT. You know, how many active users do you have in India? What surprised you about the adoption, the rate of adoption, the pace of adoption in India? Why do you believe you've seen this kind of an uptick here?
Yeah, I mean our active users in India tripled, more than tripled in 2024. So it's been incredible to watch. This, we a few weeks ago we launched a new image generation tool using AI to generate incredibly, you know, images that you can control to a great degree whether you want them to be vivid and lifelike or cartoony or following a particular style. We saw, you know, Prime Minister Modi tweeted using our image gen feature. We had cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar tweet images from ChatGPT and it just took off. I mean, unlike anything I've ever seen. I've been fortunate to be at Twitter for many years. I led product at Instagram for a number of years. I mean, these companies were growing very quickly. I have never seen anything grow like ChatGPT is growing because people were having so much fun creating these images, sharing them with their friends, you know, on WhatsApp and in other places. And it's just incredible to see. So we marshaled a whole lot of resources. We really tried to support it especially in India. We released new features around our image gen like image galleries that let you quickly view all of the images that you've created. There's just a huge amount of excitement in India for ChatGPT and not just for this image gen feature but also, you know, ChatGPT speaks 100 languages, it can teach you any subject you want to learn, it can save you time at home and at work. And so, you know, it's just so broadly useful and it's completely free. You don't have to pay us a dime. You can use it on an Android phone for free. So it's just, you know, we deeply believe in bringing AI to the world and the positive impacts that that can make. And I can't think of a better example than what's happening in India right now with ChatGPT.
All right, on that note we're going to wrap up this special edition of Earning Central. More news and updates will continue right here on CNBC TV18. For now, goodbye. Thank you for watching.
I've ever seen. I've been fortunate to be at Twitter for many years. I led product at Instagram for a number of years. I mean, these companies were growing very quickly. I have never seen anything grow like ChatGPT was growing because people were having so much fun creating these images, sharing them with their friends on WhatsApp and in other places. And it's just incredible to see. So we marshaled a whole lot of resources. We really tried to support it, especially in India. We released new features around our image gen, like image galleries that let you quickly view all of the images that you've created. There's just a huge amount of excitement in India for ChatGPT, and not just for this image gen feature, but also, you know, ChatGPT speaks 100 languages, it can teach you any subject you want to learn, it can save you time at home and at work. And so, you know, it's just so broadly useful and it's completely free. You don't have to pay us a dime. You can use it on an Android phone for free. So it's just, you know, we deeply believe in bringing AI to the world and the positive impacts that that can make. And I can't think of a better example than what's happening in India right now with ChatGPT.
All right, on that note, we're going to wrap up this special edition of Earning Central. More news and updates will continue right here on CNBC TV18. For now, it's goodbye. Thank you for watching.
Fourth quarter numbers beat street estimates with profits up about 6.7% and net interest income up 10.3% over the previous year. Asset quality improved while the net interest margins on total assets came in at a seven-quarter high. Abhishek Kotari is joining in with the numbers.
Well, HDFC Bank reported its Q4 FY25 numbers. The numbers were strong, especially on the core operating profit growth, which was up more than 20% year-on-year and about 4.9% on a sequential basis. So take a look at the net interest margin on total assets. It's at a seven-quarter high of about 3.54% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Now this has a one-off of about 7 to 8 basis points with respect to net interest margin. So even then it comes down to 3.46% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Analysts were estimating a decline in net interest margin. However, they have expanded without including even the one-off income over there. Take a look at the cost-to-income ratio. It's at a four-quarter low of 39.8% versus 40.6% in the previous quarter. The annualized quarterly slippage ratio is at a five-quarter low, coming in at 1.15% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. Overall, the slippages have declined nearly 15% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, which is heartening to see. Their asset quality remains impeccable and continues to improve, with one of the best in the industry. A gross NPA ratio is at 1.3% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. The net NPA ratio has also declined by three basis points on a sequential basis. The other key highlights being the net interest income growth is about 10.3% year-on-year and about 4.6% sequentially. They have been able to command better yield because the loan growth is at just 5.5% year-on-year and about 4% sequentially. The OPEX has remained under control for them, which has helped the operating profit growth. OPEX have declined by 2.3% year-on-year and grown by only 2.6% quarter-on-quarter. Overall, the provisions are down 76.5% year-on-year, but they have increased by just 1.2% sequentially. So PAT is a growth of 6.7% year-on-year and about 5.3% quarter-on-quarter. Overall, good numbers coming in from HDFC Bank, especially on the core operating profit growth. Back to you.
Well, the other big lender, ICICI Bank, reported a mixed set of numbers with business momentum slowing down while profitability was above street estimates. Abhishek, tell us more on that front.
Mixed set of numbers coming in from ICICI Bank. Weak with respect to business momentum that you are seeing for them, while the P&L continues to remain strong for them. Take a look at the deposit growth: 14% year-on-year and about 5.9% sequentially. Year-on-year, it's the weakest deposit growth that you are seeing in the last eight quarters. Now, advances growth is at 13.3% year-on-year and just 2.1% quarter-on-quarter. So, while this 13.3% growth is the weakest that you are seeing in the last 17 quarters, and sequentially it's one of the weakest loan growth that you are seeing in the last 15 quarters. So, loan growth remains very weak for them compared to their historical numbers. The net interest margin is at a five-quarter high of 4.41% versus 4.25%. The core operating profit growth is at a five-quarter high of 13.7% year-on-year and 5.5% sequentially. The quarterly annualized slippage ratio, that's heartening to see. It's a 17-quarter low of 1.5% versus 1.85% in the previous quarter. Their asset quality continues to improve and remains one of the best that you are seeing in the last 10 years or even more. Gross NPA ratio down to 1.67% versus 1.96% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio down to 0.39% versus 0.42% in the previous quarter. So asset quality and P&L gets a thumbs up, while weak business momentum or weak loan growth actually impacts the balance sheet. Back to you.
All right. And finally, Yes Bank also reported its fourth quarter numbers where net profits saw a 63% rise on a year-on-year basis. Take us through the details, Abhishek.
Well, control over cost of funds has actually held the net interest margin and the P&L of Yes Bank in this quarter. So take a look at the P&L versus estimates. The NII has a beat of 4.3% while the PAT beat is about 23.5%. Net interest margin is at an eight-quarter high of 2.5%. The loan growth is very weak, one of the weakest that you are seeing in the last seven quarters, just 8.1% year-on-year and about 0.55% sequentially. The securities receipts are now nil, so basically they are now zero. Other income has also aided the topline growth for them. So other income is up 15% quarter-on-quarter as fee income is up 21.5% on a sequential basis. So overall, the loan growth was weak, but they made up in the fees. Fee income was very strong for them. So cost-to-income ratio hence is at the lowest in the last 15 quarters, coming in at 67.3% versus 71.1% in the previous quarter as OPEX has declined by more than 4% year-on-year. Annualized slippage ratio is at a 10-quarter low, coming in at less than 2%, 1.99% versus 2.2% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio is one of the lowest that you are seeing in the last eight years or even more. Net NPA ratio is now down to 0.3% versus 0.5% in the previous quarter. A quarterly annualized credit cost is at a four-quarter high of 1.48% versus 1.26% in the previous quarter. Looks like there might have been a bit of write-off which caught provisioning this time around. Return ratios, they are one of the best for the bank in the last 25 quarters, but one of the weakest when you see with respect to peers, underperforming because return ratios continue to remain tepid when compared to peers, but one of the best in 25 quarters. ROA at 0.7% versus 0.6% in the previous quarter. ROE at 6.2% when compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter.
Thanks very much. Let's cut across to HDFC Bank's earnings con-call being addressed by their CFO, Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
Driven by favorable monsoon and increased rabi sowing, well for strong agricultural performance. This would be further supported by gradually improving manufacturing sector and steady service sector output. As we look forward for FY26, we expect GDP growth to sustain, supported by pickup in rural spending, discretionary consumer demand, investment activity, and multiplier effect of the income tax reduction and RBI repo cut boost to aggregate demand along with providing durable liquidity to the system. We acknowledge that the global macro environment outlook has become more uncertain due to the recent tariff-related measures and volatility surrounding them. This may potentially impact global inflation, leading to lower growth across economies. As we see it, corporates have adopted a wait-and-watch stance as we're waiting for more clarity. We remain watchful in this area.
Getting to the deposits. Robust deposit franchise powered by vast distribution strength and strong 97 million customer relationships has grown our deposits to 27.1 trillion. 1.5 trillion growth in the quarter, 5.9% or 3.3 trillion in the 12-month period last year, growing at a rate of 14.1%. On an average basis on the deposits, we've seen growth of 15.8% year-on-year. Savings deposits also grew by 249 billion or 4.1% sequentially. Overall, CASA deposits entered the quarter at 9.4 trillion, growth of 0.7 trillion in the quarter, resulting in CASA ratio of 34.8% compared to 34% in December. Term deposits aggregating to rupees 17.7 trillion as of March end, 0.8 trillion or 4.7% during the quarter and 3 trillion rupees or 20.3% year-on-year. On the branch network, we added 312 branches during the quarter and 717 branches over the past 12 months. We added 1.8 million new liability relationships. We worked on rebalancing the funding profile with better mix of deposits and lowering borrowing, resulting in a CD ratio of 96.5% coming down from 104.4% in prior year. Borrowing mix is now at 14% of total liabilities versus 18% at the end of prior year.
In terms of loans, assets, advances under management as of March end at 27.7 trillion, grew by 0.9 trillion or 3.3% during the quarter and 2 trillion rupees over the prior year. On an average, AUM growth of 7.3% year-over-year. Getting to capital strength, our capital adequacy ratio is 19.6% with the CET1 at 17.2% and balance sheet remains resilient with an average LCR of about 119%.
Strong revenues with a resilient NIM. Revenues were at 441 billion for the quarter and for the year at 1,683 billion. Net interest margin remained in a range-bound and grew by 10% over prior year at 321 billion. The margin on a reported basis was 3.54% and on a core basis 3.46%. On an interest-earning asset basis, the reported margin was at 3.73%. Now getting to operating expenses for the quarter, operating expenses at 176 billion, up by 2.6% over prior quarter. Expenses remained best-in-class at 1.9% of total assets and cost-to-income was at 39.8%.
Getting to credit, asset quality is a key strength and a differentiator and it remains pristine. The GNP ratio was at 1.33% as compared to 1.42% in prior quarter. GNPA ratio excluding NPAs in agricultural segment was 1.13% prior quarter 1.19%. Now getting to the total provisions, were at about 32 billion and for the quarter, prior quarter was also at about 32 billion. The total provisions coverage was at 68%. Total provisions coverage excluding agriculture was at 71%. Stock of provisions, contingent and floating provisions were approximately rupees 259 billion, contingent at 135 billion and floating provisions at 124 billion. General provisions were 109 billion. Total provisions comprising specific, floating, contingent, and general were about 172% of gross non-performing loans. This is in addition to securities held as collateral in several of the cases. The annualized credit cost ratio for the quarter was at 48 basis points. Prior quarter was at 50 basis points.
Net profit after tax for the quarter was 176 billion and net profit after tax for the full year was 673 billion and grew by 10.7% over prior year. Now getting to the closing, as liquidity and economic growth improves, we are well placed to grow both in deposits and loans. Deposits, as I mentioned, grew 15.8% over prior year and loans momentum as seen in the sequential growth was at 3.3% sequential growth, which works to about the annualized rate of about 12 to 13%. This delivers a return on assets in the quarter of about 1.94% and return on equity of about 14.4%. The earnings per share in the quarter, quarterly earnings per share 23 rupees at the bank standalone level and 24.6 rupees at consolidated bank level. The book value per share on a standalone bank is rupees 655 and at the consolidated bank is at about rupees 681.9. I do want to point out the dividend that has been recommended. The board of directors recommended a dividend of rupees 22 per equity share of rupees 1 for the year ended March 31, 2025. This will be subject to the approval of shareholders at the ensuing annual general meeting. Thank you. Thanks to all the employees for the remarkable performance. With that, may I request the operator to open up the line for questions.
All right. That was the HDFC Bank CFO on the bank's fourth quarter numbers that beat estimates on both the top line and the bottom line. On that note, we're going to have to slip into a short break, but don't go anywhere. We're back in just a moment with more news and updates.
Welcome back. Now on to some more earnings. Infosys missed estimates in the fourth quarter. Dollar revenue growth contracted by 4%, forcing the company to miss its full-year growth guidance. The IT major is also expecting growth to remain subdued in the entire financial year. Remma Tendulkar is here with the fine print of the Infosys numbers.
Remma, thanks so much for that. So let me give you the key points from Infosys' numbers. One, for the March quarter, a big revenue miss. The company's topline has declined by 3.5% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, lower than street expectations. The good part is the company is giving us a guidance. They are saying in FY26 revenue growth will be 0 to 3%, slightly lower than the 1 to 4% that the street analysts were hoping for. But you know, the environment is uncertain. But the management did say that at the lower end of the guidance, which is 0%, they are baking in some deterioration in the macro. At the upper end, that's 3%, they're assuming the macros remain stable or slight improvement. Margin guidance remains unchanged at 20 to 22%. But back to Q4 now. Q4 was very weak for the company, at least in terms of the top line at minus 3.5% revenue growth. It's also lower than peers, and because of that, the company has missed achieving its FY25 guidance. They end FY25 with a topline growth of 4.2%, lower than the 4.5 to 5% that they guided for. That said, their margin defense has been strong. The company's EBIT margins were at 21%, very modest decline on a sequential basis, but considering the negative topline growth, it's a strong performance on the margin front. Deal wins too have inched up by 4-5% on a sequential basis at $2.6 billion. So on the whole, it's a muted Q4. The guidance is slightly lower than street expectations, but the guidance shouldn't come as a surprise based on the commentary that we've heard from the management, and the street will take comfort from the deal wins and even the margin performance.
All right, Remma, we leave it at that. Thanks very much for joining in. Now, while addressing the media earlier, the Infosys CEO and MD Salil Parekh commented on deal wins made by the company and how that is expected to roll out despite the looming uncertainty. Take a look.
In terms of mega deals, we had two mega deals in the last financial year. We have a pipeline of mega deals today. What is sort of what we saw in the past when things of this nature happen, which is changes in the environment, there's also an interest with clients on cost takeout, automation, and efficiency and consolidation. We will see how it plays out because it's only a few days as clients have looked at it, but we have seen large deals moving, which we have closed, moving into the next phases, as was evident.
Now, IndiGo is aiming to increase its international capacity to 40% this year, says CEO Peter Elbers. Now speaking to Shireen Bhan, Elbers welcomed a grievance redressal body for customers on airfares, but he also called for correlation between the cost of doing business and airfares. Now, the IndiGo CEO also warned about the rising airport fee, saying it runs the risk of tipping over. Take a look.
The IndiGo international network started some years back, very traditional if you wish, between India and the Gulf and the Middle East countries. We've been slowly expanding that. So in '23, we started flights into Central Asia. We started flights into Nairobi. We have moved, and I had a meeting earlier this week with the CEO of Changi Airport. We moved from moving into Singapore from three Indian cities to nine today. So, but that's still within that 5 to 6-hour radius. I think the next step for IndiGo is to make sure that even Europe and further parts of Asia would be accessible directly operated by IndiGo. And you know, if India is going to be the third-largest economy in the world by '27, the country needs and deserves actually an airline of the size and scale and potential of the nation.
We once again seen the parliamentary panel recommend the possibility of looking at intervening in the market as far as prices are concerned. We've now got the government setting up a special cell where customers can actually talk about their complaints as far as pricing is concerned. Would you worry about the possibility of government intervention on pricing at this point in time when there's a body where customers can complain about certain things?
I think that's a good thing. There's always good for companies to have a body which keeps sort of things in balance and things. So I think in general to have a body like that is a good thing. Having said that, looking at the Indian market, it's one of the most, if not the most, competitive market in the world. The average price levels are extremely competitive. There has been some recent reports which made a comparison: how did inflation go over the years and how did airfares go? And actually, you could see that the inflation has gone much, much faster than the airfare. So we need to catch up in that, in efficiency, and sort of in order to keep the margins, because in the long run there must be a correlation between the cost of doing business and the price of airfares, right? Otherwise, you'll be out of business. Looking at the price sensitivity, a few hundred of rupees sometimes is enough to have people flying or not flying. So we should be mindful of looking how these user fees will eventually find their way into ticket prices, because again, at the end of the day, there's a correlation between what is the cost price of a product and what is the price for the consumer eventually. So full support for all the changes. I think it's important that it's being done, but we should be mindful that, you know, at the end of the day, the price of the ticket is based on different elements, and this aspect is an important part of that, and that should be in line with it.
Is it in line with what you believe is the kind of threshold, or do you believe it's tipped over?
I think at some points it runs the risk of tipping over. You know, if you take the price of a ticket, the price of some of the UDFs should, in terms of percentage and correlation, should not be too much as a total price of the ticket, right? There's still going to be fuel and flying and this and that and the other. So I think, again, full support for all the changes we're making, but we should be mindful of what would it do eventually for the total ticket prices.
All right. Now, OpenAI has launched new AI reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, products which are developer-focused with an improvement in coding abilities. Now, ChatGPT is also gaining immense traction in India with users tripling in 2024 to become OpenAI's second-largest global market. Now, as part of our global dialogue series, CNBC TV18's Shireen Bhan spoke with Kevin Weil, the Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, to discuss their plans for the Indian market and the Ghibli image generation tool which has gone viral in the country. Take a look.
Let me start by asking you, Kevin, to give us a snapshot in very simple language. What does ChatGPT 4.1 mean for OpenAI and for consumers, and how do o3 and o4-mini change the game?
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here with you. India is an incredibly important market for OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's our second-largest market. It's our fastest-growing market, and it's also the market where we saw our image generation just take off. But we had some great launches this week. You mentioned GPT-4.1, which was a model for developers that is fantastic at coding and complex instruction following. And so, you know, that was a model that we released focused on developers, and we're seeing them, you know, we have over three million developers on the OpenAI platform, and they're doing amazing things. That is one of our fastest-growing models by usage ever. And then just this morning in the US, we launched o3 and o4-mini, which are our frontier reasoning models. They're the smartest, fastest, safest models that we have ever launched. They're incredible at things like computer programming. So if you look at measures like on competitive coding benchmarks, these models would be better at competitive coding than all but about 200 people in the world. And they can answer hard PhD-level science questions better than 80% of PhDs in their field across all fields simultaneously. So they're really very intelligent models, but you can also use them for more mundane tasks: understanding medical jargon, or looking at what's happening in the world, creating images, helping you with writing, translating languages. You know, these models are so dynamic, and we're super excited to see what people can do with them.
Let's talk about what you're seeing in India. You talked about how it is today your fastest-growing market for ChatGPT. How many active users do you have in India? What surprised you about the adoption, the rate of adoption, the pace of adoption in India? Why do you believe you've seen this kind of an uptick here?
Yeah, I mean, our active users in India tripled, more than tripled, in 2024. So it's been incredible to watch. A few weeks ago, we launched a new image generation tool using AI to generate incredibly, you know, images that you can control to a great degree, whether you want them to be vivid and lifelike or cartoony or following a particular style. We saw, you know, Prime Minister Modi tweeted using our image gen feature. We had cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar tweet images from ChatGPT, and it just took off. I mean, unlike anything I've ever seen. I've been fortunate to be at Twitter for many years. I led product at Instagram for a number of years. I mean, these companies were growing very quickly. I have never seen anything grow like ChatGPT was growing because people were having so much fun creating these images, sharing them with their friends on WhatsApp and in other places. And it's just incredible to see. So we marshaled a whole lot of resources. We really tried to support it, especially in India. We released new features around our image gen, like image galleries that let you quickly view all of the images that you've created. There's just a huge amount of excitement in India for ChatGPT, and not just for this image gen feature, but also, you know, ChatGPT speaks 100 languages, it can teach you any subject you want to learn, it can save you time at home and at work. And so, you know, it's just so broadly useful and it's completely free. You don't have to pay us a dime. You can use it on an Android phone for free. So it's just, you know, we deeply believe in bringing AI to the world and the positive impacts that that can make. And I can't think of a better example than what's happening in India right now with ChatGPT.
All right, on that note, we're going to wrap up this special edition of Earning Central. More news and updates will continue right here on CNBC TV18. For now, it's a goodbye. Thank you for watching.
Fourth quarter numbers beat street estimates with profits up about 6.7% and net interest income up 10.3% over the previous year. Asset quality improved while the net interest margins on total assets came in at a seven-quarter high. Abhishek Kotari is joining in with the numbers.
Well, HDFC Bank reported its Q4 FY25 numbers. The numbers were strong, especially on the core operating profit growth, which was up more than 20% year-on-year and about 4.9% on a sequential basis. So take a look at the net interest margin on total assets. It's at a seven-quarter high of about 3.54% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Now this has a one-off of about 7 to 8 basis points with respect to net interest margin. So even then it comes down to 3.46% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Analysts were estimating a decline in net interest margin. However, they have expanded without including even the one-off income over there. Take a look at the cost-to-income ratio. It's at a four-quarter low of 39.8% versus 40.6% in the previous quarter. The annualized quarterly slippage ratio is at a five-quarter low, coming in at 1.15% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. Overall, the slippages have declined nearly 15% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, which is heartening to see. Their asset quality remains impeccable and continues to improve, with one of the best in the industry. A gross NPA ratio is at 1.3% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. The net NPA ratio has also declined by three basis points on a sequential basis. The other key highlights being the net interest income growth is about 10.3% year-on-year and about 4.6% sequentially. They have been able to command better yield because the loan growth is at just 5.5% year-on-year and about 4% sequentially. The OPEX has remained under control for them, which has helped the operating profit growth. OPEX have declined by 2.3% year-on-year and grown by only 2.6% quarter-on-quarter. Overall, the provisions are down 76.5% year-on-year, but they have increased by just 1.2% sequentially. So PAT is a growth of 6.7% year-on-year and about 5.3% quarter-on-quarter. Overall, good numbers coming in from HDFC Bank, especially on the core operating profit growth. Back to you.
Well, the other big lender, ICICI Bank, reported a mixed set of numbers with business momentum slowing down while profitability was above street estimates. Abhishek, tell us more on that front.
Mixed set of numbers coming in from ICICI Bank. Weak with respect to business momentum that you are seeing for them, while the P&L continues to remain strong for them. Take a look at the deposit growth: 14% year-on-year and about 5.9% sequentially. Year-on-year, it's the weakest deposit growth that you are seeing in the last eight quarters. Now, advances growth is at 13.3% year-on-year and just 2.1% quarter-on-quarter. So, while this 13.3% growth is the weakest that you are seeing in the last 17 quarters, and sequentially it's one of the weakest loan growth that you are seeing in the last 15 quarters. So, loan growth remains very weak for them compared to their historical numbers. The net interest margin is at a five-quarter high of 4.41% versus 4.25%. The core operating profit growth is at a five-quarter high of 13.7% year-on-year and 5.5% sequentially. The quarterly annualized slippage ratio, that's heartening to see. It's a 17-quarter low of 1.5% versus 1.85% in the previous quarter. Their asset quality continues to improve and remains one of the best that you are seeing in the last 10 years or even more. Gross NPA ratio down to 1.67% versus 1.96% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio down to 0.39% versus 0.42% in the previous quarter. So asset quality and P&L gets a thumbs up, while weak business momentum or weak loan growth actually impacts the balance sheet. Back to you.
All right. And finally, Yes Bank also reported its fourth quarter numbers where net profits saw a 63% rise on a year-on-year basis. Take us through the details, Abhishek.
Well, control over cost of funds has actually held the net interest margin and the P&L of Yes Bank in this quarter. So take a look at the P&L versus estimates. The NII has a beat of 4.3% while the PAT beat is about 23.5%. Net interest margin is at an eight-quarter high of 2.5%. The loan growth is very weak, one of the weakest that you are seeing in the last seven quarters, just 8.1% year-on-year and about 0.55% sequentially. The securities receipts are now nil, so basically they are now zero. Other income has also aided the topline growth for them. So other income is up 15% quarter-on-quarter as fee income is up 21.5% on a sequential basis. So overall, the loan growth was weak, but they made up in the fees. Fee income was very strong for them. So cost-to-income ratio hence is at the lowest in the last 15 quarters, coming in at 67.3% versus 71.1% in the previous quarter as OPEX has declined by more than 4% year-on-year. Annualized slippage ratio is at a 10-quarter low, coming in at less than 2%, 1.99% versus 2.2% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio is one of the lowest that you are seeing in the last eight years or even more. Net NPA ratio is now down to 0.3% versus 0.5% in the previous quarter. A quarterly annualized credit cost is at a four-quarter high of 1.48% versus 1.26% in the previous quarter. Looks like there might have been a bit of write-off which caught provisioning this time around. Return ratios, they are one of the best for the bank in the last 25 quarters, but one of the weakest when you see with respect to peers, underperforming because return ratios continue to remain tepid when compared to peers, but one of the best in 25 quarters. ROA at 0.7% versus 0.6% in the previous quarter. ROE at 6.2% when compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter.
Thanks very much. Let's cut across to HDFC Bank's earnings con-call being addressed by their CFO, Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
Driven by favorable monsoon and increased rabi sowing, well for strong agricultural performance. This would be further supported by gradually improving manufacturing sector and steady service sector output. As we look forward for FY26, we expect GDP growth to sustain, supported by pickup in rural spending, discretionary consumer demand, investment activity, and multiplier effect of the income tax reduction and RBI repo cut boost to aggregate demand along with providing durable liquidity to the system. We acknowledge that the global macro environment outlook has become more uncertain due to the recent tariff-related measures and volatility surrounding them. This may potentially impact global inflation, leading to lower growth across economies. As we see it, corporates have adopted a wait-and-watch stance as we're waiting for more clarity. We remain watchful in this area.
Getting to the deposits. Robust deposit franchise powered by vast distribution strength and strong 97 million customer relationships has grown our deposits to 27.1 trillion. 1.5 trillion growth in the quarter, 5.9% or 3.3 trillion in the 12-month period last year, growing at a rate of 14.1%. On an average basis on the deposits, we've seen growth of 15.8% year-on-year. Savings deposits also grew by 249 billion or 4.1% sequentially. Overall, CASA deposits entered the quarter at 9.4 trillion, growth of 0.7 trillion in the quarter, resulting in CASA ratio of 34.8% compared to 34% in December. Term deposits aggregating to rupees 17.7 trillion as of March end, 0.8 trillion or 4.7% during the quarter and 3 trillion rupees or 20.3% year-on-year. On the branch network, we added 312 branches during the quarter and 717 branches over the past 12 months. We added 1.8 million new liability relationships. We worked on rebalancing the funding profile with better mix of deposits and lowering borrowing, resulting in a CD ratio of 96.5% coming down from 104.4% in prior year. Borrowing mix is now at 14% of total liabilities versus 18% at the end of prior year.
In terms of loans, assets, advances under management as of March end at 27.7 trillion, grew by 0.9 trillion or 3.3% during the quarter and 2 trillion rupees over the prior year. On an average, AUM growth of 7.3% year-over-year. Getting to capital strength, our capital adequacy ratio is 19.6% with the CET1 at 17.2% and balance sheet remains resilient with an average LCR of about 119%.
Strong revenues with a resilient NIM. Revenues were at 441 billion for the quarter and for the year at 1,683 billion. Net interest margin remained in a range-bound and grew by 10% over prior year at 321 billion. The margin on a reported basis was 3.54% and on a core basis 3.46%. On an interest-earning asset basis, the reported margin was at 3.73%. Now getting to operating expenses for the quarter, operating expenses at 176 billion, up by 2.6% over prior quarter. Expenses remained best-in-class at 1.9% of total assets and cost-to-income was at 39.8%.
Getting to credit, asset quality is a key strength and a differentiator and it remains pristine. The GNP ratio was at 1.33% as compared to 1.42% in prior quarter. GNPA ratio excluding NPAs in agricultural segment was 1.13% prior quarter 1.19%. Now getting to the total provisions, were at about 32 billion and for the quarter, prior quarter was also at about 32 billion. The total provisions coverage was at 68%. Total provisions coverage excluding agriculture was at 71%. Stock of provisions, contingent and floating provisions were approximately rupees 259 billion, contingent at 135 billion and floating provisions at 124 billion. General provisions were 109 billion. Total provisions comprising specific, floating, contingent, and general were about 172% of gross non-performing loans. This is in addition to securities held as collateral in several of the cases. The annualized credit cost ratio for the quarter was at 48 basis points. Prior quarter was at 50 basis points.
Net profit after tax for the quarter was 176 billion and net profit after tax for the full year was 673 billion and grew by 10.7% over prior year. Now getting to the closing, as liquidity and economic growth improves, we are well placed to grow both in deposits and loans. Deposits, as I mentioned, grew 15.8% over prior year and loans momentum as seen in the sequential growth was at 3.3% sequential growth, which works to about the annualized rate of about 12 to 13%. This delivers a return on assets in the quarter of about 1.94% and return on equity of about 14.4%. The earnings per share in the quarter, quarterly earnings per share 23 rupees at the bank standalone level and 24.6 rupees at consolidated bank level. The book value per share on a standalone bank is rupees 655 and at the consolidated bank is at about rupees 681.9. I do want to point out the dividend that has been recommended. The board of directors recommended a dividend of rupees 22 per equity share of rupees 1 for the year ended March 31, 2025. This will be subject to the approval of shareholders at the ensuing annual general meeting. Thank you. Thanks to our employees for the remarkable performance. With that, may I request the operator to open up the line for questions.
All right. That was the HDFC Bank CFO on the bank's fourth quarter numbers that beat estimates on both the top line and the bottom line. On that note, we're going to have to slip into a short break, but don't go anywhere. We're back in just a moment with more news and updates.
Welcome back. Now on to some more earnings. Infosys missed estimates in the fourth quarter. Dollar revenue growth contracted by 4%, forcing the company to miss its full-year growth guidance. The IT major is also expecting growth to remain subdued in the entire financial year. Remma Tendulkar is here with the fine print of the Infosys numbers.
Remma, thanks so much for that. So let me give you the key points from Infosys' numbers. One, for the March quarter, a big revenue miss. The company's topline has declined by 3.5% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, lower than street expectations. The good part is the company is giving us a guidance. They are saying in FY26 revenue growth will be 0 to 3%, slightly lower than the 1 to 4% that the street analysts were hoping for. But you know, the environment is uncertain. But the management did say that at the lower end of the guidance, which is 0%, they are baking in some deterioration in the macro. At the upper end, that's 3%, they're assuming the macros remain stable or slight improvement. Margin guidance remains unchanged at 20 to 22%. But back to Q4 now. Q4 was very weak for the company, at least in terms of the top line at minus 3.5% revenue growth. It's also lower than peers, and because of that, the company has missed achieving its FY25 guidance. They end FY25 with a topline growth of 4.2%, lower than the 4.5 to 5% that they guided for. That said, their margin defense has been strong. The company's EBIT margins were at 21%, very modest decline on a sequential basis, but considering the negative topline growth, it's a strong performance on the margin front. Deal wins too have inched up by 4-5% on a sequential basis at $2.6 billion. So on the whole, it's a muted Q4. The guidance is slightly lower than street expectations, but the guidance shouldn't come as a surprise based on the commentary that we've heard from the management, and the street will take comfort from the deal wins and even the margin performance.
All right, Remma, we leave it at that. Thanks very much for joining in. Now, while addressing the media earlier, the Infosys CEO and MD Salil Parekh commented on deal wins made by the company and how that is expected to roll out despite the looming uncertainty. Take a look.
In terms of mega deals, we had two mega deals in the last financial year. We have a pipeline of mega deals today. What is sort of what we saw in the past when things of this nature happen, which is changes in the environment, there's also an interest with clients on cost takeout, automation, and efficiency and consolidation. We will see how it plays out because it's only a few days as clients have looked at it, but we have seen large deals moving, which we have closed, moving into the next phases, as was evident.
Now, IndiGo is aiming to increase its international capacity to 40% this year, says CEO Peter Elbers. Now speaking to Shireen Bhan, Elbers welcomed a grievance redressal body for customers on airfares, but he also called for correlation between the cost of doing business and airfares. Now, the IndiGo CEO also warned about the rising airport fee, saying it runs the risk of tipping over. Take a look.
The IndiGo international network started some years back, very traditional if you wish, between India and the Gulf and the Middle East countries. We've been slowly expanding that. So in '23, we started flights into Central Asia. We started flights into Nairobi. We have moved, and I had a meeting earlier this week with the CEO of Changi Airport. We moved from moving into Singapore from three Indian cities to nine today. So, but that's still within that 5 to 6-hour radius. I think the next step for IndiGo is to make sure that even Europe and further parts of Asia would be accessible directly operated by IndiGo. And you know, if India is going to be the third-largest economy in the world by '27, the country needs and deserves actually an airline of the size and scale and potential of the nation.
We once again seen the parliamentary panel recommend the possibility of looking at intervening in the market as far as prices are concerned. We've now got the government setting up a special cell where customers can actually talk about their complaints as far as pricing is concerned. Would you worry about the possibility of government intervention on pricing at this point in time when there's a body where customers can complain about certain things?
I think that's a good thing. There's always good for companies to have a body which keeps sort of things in balance and things. So I think in general to have a body like that is a good thing. Having said that, looking at the Indian market, it's one of the most, if not the most, competitive market in the world. The average price levels are extremely competitive. There has been some recent reports which made a comparison: how did inflation go over the years and how did airfares go? And actually, you could see that the inflation has gone much, much faster than the airfare. So we need to catch up in that, in efficiency, and sort of in order to keep the margins, because in the long run there must be a correlation between the cost of doing business and the price of airfares, right? Otherwise, you'll be out of business. Looking at the price sensitivity, a few hundred of rupees sometimes is enough to have people flying or not flying. So we should be mindful of looking how these user fees will eventually find their way into ticket prices, because again, at the end of the day, there's a correlation between what is the cost price of a product and what is the price for the consumer eventually. So full support for all the changes. I think it's important that it's being done, but we should be mindful that, you know, at the end of the day, the price of the ticket is based on different elements, and this aspect is an important part of that, and that should be in line with it.
Is it in line with what you believe is the kind of threshold, or do you believe it's tipped over?
I think at some points it runs the risk of tipping over. You know, if you take the price of a ticket, the price of some of the UDFs should, in terms of percentage and correlation, should not be too much as a total price of the ticket, right? There's going to be fuel and flying and this and that and the other. So I think, again, full support for all the changes we're making, but we should be mindful of what would it do eventually for the total ticket prices.
All right. Now, OpenAI has launched new AI reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, products which are developer-focused with an improvement in coding abilities. Now, ChatGPT is also gaining immense traction in India with users tripling in 2024 to become OpenAI's second-largest global market. Now, as part of our global dialogue series, CNBC TV18's Shireen Bhan spoke with Kevin Weil, the Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, to discuss their plans for the Indian market and the Ghibli image generation tool which has gone viral in the country. Take a look.
Let me start by asking you, Kevin, to give us a snapshot in very simple language. What does ChatGPT 4.1 mean for OpenAI and for consumers, and how do o3 and o4-mini change the game?
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here with you. India is an incredibly important market for OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's our second-largest market. It's our fastest-growing market, and it's also the market where we saw our image generation just take off. But we had some great launches this week. You mentioned GPT-4.1, which was a model for developers that is fantastic at coding and complex instruction following. And so, you know, that was a model that we released focused on developers, and we're seeing them, you know, we have over 3 million developers on the OpenAI platform, and they're doing amazing things. That is one of our fastest-growing models by usage ever. And then just this morning in the US, we launched o3 and o4-mini, which are our frontier reasoning models. They're the smartest, fastest, safest models that we have ever launched. They're incredible at things like computer programming. So if you look at measures like on competitive coding benchmarks, these models would be better at competitive coding than all but about 200 people in the world.
coding than all but about 200 people in the world and they can answer hard PhD level science questions better than 80% of PhDs in their field across all fields simultaneously. So they're really very intelligent models. But you can also use them for more mundane tasks, understanding medical jargon or looking at what's happening in the world, creating images, helping you with writing, translating languages. You know, these models are so dynamic and we're super excited to see what people can do with them.
Let's talk about what you're seeing in India. You talked about how it is today your fastest growing market for ChatGPT. How many active users do you have in India? What surprised you about the adoption, the rate of adoption, the pace of adoption in India? Why do you believe you've seen this kind of an uptick here?
Yeah, I mean our active users in India tripled, more than tripled in 2024. So it's been incredible to watch. A few weeks ago we launched a new image generation tool using AI to generate incredibly images that you can control to a great degree, whether you want them to be vivid and lifelike or cartoony or following a particular style. We saw Prime Minister Modi tweet using our image gen feature. We had cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar tweet images from ChatGPT and it just took off. I mean, unlike anything I've ever seen. I've been fortunate to be at Twitter for many years. I led product at Instagram for a number of years. I mean, these companies were growing very quickly. I have never seen anything grow like ChatGPT was growing because people were having so much fun creating these images, sharing them with their friends on WhatsApp and in other places. And it's just incredible to see. So we marshaled a whole lot of resources. We really tried to support it, especially in India. We released new features around our image gen like image galleries that let you quickly view all of the images that you've created. There's just a huge amount of excitement in India for ChatGPT and not just for this image gen feature but also ChatGPT speaks 100 languages, it can teach you any subject you want to learn, it can save you time at home and at work. And so it's just so broadly useful and it's completely free. You don't have to pay us a dime. You can use it on an Android phone for free. So it's just, we deeply believe in bringing AI to the world and the positive impacts that can make. And I can't think of a better example than what's happening in India right now with ChatGPT.
All right, on that note we're going to wrap up this special edition of Earnings Central. More news and updates will continue right here on CNBC TV18. For now, it's goodbye. Thank you for watching.
Fourth quarter numbers beat street estimates with profits up about 6.7% and net interest income up 10.3% over the previous year. Asset quality improved while the net interest margins on total assets came in at a seven quarter high. Abhishek Kotari is joining in with the numbers.
Well, HDFC Bank reported its Q4 FY25 numbers. The numbers were strong especially on the core operating profit growth which was up more than 20% YoY and about 4.9% on a sequential basis. So take a look at the net interest margin on total assets. It's at a 7 quarter high of about 3.54% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Now this has a one-off of about 7 to 8 basis points with respect to net interest margin. So even then it comes down to 3.46% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Analysts were estimating a decline in net interest margin. However, they have expanded without including even the one-off income over there. Take a look at the cost to income ratio. It's at a 4 quarter low of 39.8% versus 40.6% in the previous quarter. The annualized quarterly slippage ratio is at a 5 quarter low coming in at 1.15% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. Overall the slippages have declined nearly 15% on a quarter-on-quarter basis which is heartening to see. Their asset quality remains impeccable and continues to improve with one of the best in the industry. A gross NPA ratio is at 1.3% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. The net NPA ratio has also declined by three basis points on a sequential basis. The other key highlights being the net interest income growth is about 10.3% YoY and about 4.6% sequentially. They have been able to command better because the loan growth is at just 5.5% YoY and about 4% sequentially. The OPEX has remained under control for them which has helped the operating profit growth. OPEX have declined by 2.3% YoY and grown by only 2.6% quarter-on-quarter. Overall the provisions are down 76.5% YoY but they have increased by just 1.2% sequentially. So PAT is a growth of 6.7% YoY and about 5.3% quarter-on-quarter overall. Good sense, good numbers coming in from HDFC Bank especially on the core operating profit growth. Back to you.
Well, the other big lender ICICI Bank reported a mixed set of numbers with business momentum slowing down while profitability was above street estimates. Abhishek, tell us more on that front.
Mixed set of numbers coming in from ICICI Bank. Weak with respect to business momentum that you are seeing for them while the P&L continues to remain strong for them. Take a look at the deposit growth, 14% YoY and about 5.9% sequentially. YoY it's the weakest deposit growth that you are seeing in last eight quarters. Now advances growth is at 13.3% YoY and just 2.1% quarter-on-quarter. So YoY this 13.3% growth is the weakest that you are seeing in last 17 quarters and sequentially it's one of the weakest loan growth that you are seeing in last 15 quarters. So loan growth remains very weak for them compared to their historical numbers. The net interest margin is at a 5 quarter high of 4.41% versus 4.25%. The core operating profit growth is at a 5 quarter high of 13.7% YoY and 5.5% sequentially. The quarterly annualized slippage ratio, that's heartening to see. It's a 17 quarter low of 1.5% versus 1.85% in the previous quarter. Their asset quality continues to improve and remains one of the best that you are seeing in last 10 years or even more. Gross NPA ratio down to 1.67% versus 1.96% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio down to 0.39% versus 0.42% in the previous quarter. So asset quality and P&L gets a thumbs up while weak business momentum of weak loan growth actually impacts the balance sheet. Back to you.
All right. And finally, Yes Bank also reported its fourth quarter numbers where net profits saw a 63% rise on a year-on-year basis. Take us through the details, Abhishek.
Well, control over cost of funds has actually held the net interest margin and the P&L of Yes Bank in this quarter. So take a look at the P&L versus Apollo. The NII has a beat of 4.3% while the PAT beat is about 23.5%. Net interest margin is at an 8 quarter high of 2.5%. The loan growth is very weak, one of the weakest that you are seeing in last seven quarters, just 8.1% YoY and about 0.55% sequentially. The securities receipts are now nil, so basically they are now zero. Other income has also aided the topline growth for them. So other income is up 15% quarter-on-quarter as fee income is up 21.5% on a sequential basis. So overall the loan growth was weak but they made up in the fees. Fee income was very strong for them. So cost to income ratio hence is at the lowest in last 15 quarters coming in at 67.3% versus 71.1% in the previous quarter as OPEX has declined by more than 4% YoY. Annualized slippage ratio is at a 10 quarter low coming in at less than 2%, 1.99% versus 2.2% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio is one of the lowest that you are seeing in last 8 years or even more. Net NPA ratio is now down to 0.3% versus 0.5% in the previous quarter. A quarterly annualized credit cost is at a 4 quarter high of 1.48% versus 1.26% in the previous quarter. Looks like there might have been a bit of write off which caused provisioning this time around. Return ratios, they are one of the best for the bank in last 25 quarters but one of the weakest when you see with respect to peers are performing because return ratios continues to remain tepid when compared to peers but one of the best in 25 quarters. RoA at 7% versus 6% in the previous quarter. RoE at 6.2% when compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter.
Thanks very much. Let's cut across to HDFC Bank's earnings con-call being addressed by their CFO Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
Driven by favorable monsoon and increased rabi sowing, well for strong agricultural performance. This would be further supported by gradually improving manufacturing sector and steady service sector output. As we look forward for FY26, we expect GDP growth to sustain, supported by pick up in rural discretionary consumer demand, investment activity and multiplier effect of the income tax reduction and RBI repo cut boost to aggregate demand along with providing durable liquidity to the system. We acknowledge that the global macro environment outlook has become more uncertain due to the recent tariff related measures and volatility surrounding them. This may potentially impact global inflation leading to lower growth across economies. As we see it, corporates have adopted a wait and watch stance as we're waiting for more clarity. We remain watchful in this area.
Getting to the deposits. Robust deposit franchise powered by vast distribution strength and strong 97 million customer relationships has grown our deposits to 27.1 trillion. 1.5 trillion growth in the quarter, 5.9% or 3.3 trillion in 12 months period last year, growing at a rate of 14.1%. On an average basis on the deposits, we've seen growth of 15.8% year-on-year. Savings deposits also grew by 249 billion or 4.1% sequentially. Overall CASA deposits entered the quarter at 9.4 trillion, growth of 0.7 trillion in the quarter, resulting in CASA ratio of 34.8% compared to 34% in December. Term deposits aggregating to rupees 17.7 trillion as of March end, 0.8 trillion or 4.7% during the quarter and 3 trillion rupees or 20.3% year-on-year. On the branch network, we added 312 branches during the quarter and 717 branches over the past 12 months. We added 1.8 million new liability relationships. We worked on rebalancing the funding profile with better mix of deposits and lowering borrowing resulting in a CD ratio of 96.5% coming down from 104.4% in prior year. Borrowing mix is now at 14% of total liabilities versus 18% at the end of prior year.
In terms of loans, assets advances under management as of March end at 27.7 trillion grew by 0.9 trillion or 3.3% during the quarter and 2 trillion rupees over the prior year on an average AUM growth of 7.3% year-over-year. Getting to capital strength, our capital adequacy ratio is 19.6% with the CET1 at 17.2% and balance sheet remains resilient with an average LCR of about 119%.
Strong revenues with a resilient NIM. Revenues were at 441 billion for the quarter and for the year at 1,683 billion. Net interest margin remained in a rangebound and grew by 10% over prior year at 321 billion. The margin on a reported basis was 3.54% and on a core basis 3.46%. On an interest earning asset basis, the reported margin was at 3.73%. Now getting to operating expenses, for the quarter operating expenses at 176 billion, up by 2.6% over prior quarter. Expenses remained best-in-class at 1.9% of total assets and cost to income was at 39.8%.
Getting to credit, asset quality is a key strength and a differentiator and it remains pristine. The GNPA ratio was at 1.33% as compared to 1.42% in prior quarter. GNPA ratio excluding NPS in agricultural segment was 1.13% prior quarter 1.19%. Now getting to the total provisions were at about 32 billion and for the quarter prior quarter was also at about 32 billion. The total provisions coverage was at 68%. Total provisions coverage excluding agriculture was at 71%. Talk of provisions, contingent and floating provisions were approximately rupees 259 billion, contingent at 135 billion and floating provisions at 124 billion. General provisions were 109 billion. Total provisions comprising specific, floating, contingent and general were about 172% of gross non-performing loans. This is in addition to securities held as collateral in several of the cases. The annualized credit cost ratio for the quarter was at 48 basis points. Prior quarter was at 50 basis points. Net profit after tax for the quarter was 176 billion and net profit after tax for the full year was 673 billion and grew by 10.7% over prior year.
Now getting to the closing, as liquidity and economic growth improves, we are well placed to grow both in deposits and loans. Deposits as I mentioned grew 15.8% over prior year and loans momentum as seen in the sequential growth was at 3.3% sequential growth which works to about the annualized rate of about 12 to 13%. This delivers a return on assets in the quarter about 1.94% and return on equity of about 14.4%. The earnings per share in the quarter, quarterly earnings per share 23 rupees at the bank standalone level and 24.6 rupees at consolidated bank level. The book value per share on a standalone bank is rupees 655 and at the consolidated bank is at about rupees 681.9. I do want to point out to the dividend that has been, dividends, board of directors recommended a dividend of rupees 22 per equity share of rupees 1 for the year ended March 31, 2025. This will be subject to the approval of shareholders at the ensuing annual general meeting. Thank you. Thanks to our employees for the remarkable performance. With that may I request the operator to open up the line for questions.
All right. That was the HDFC Bank CFO on the bank's fourth quarter numbers that beat estimates on both the top line and the bottom line. On that note we're going to have to slip into a short break but don't go anywhere. We're back in just a moment with more news and updates.
Welcome back. Now on to some more earnings. Infosys missed estimates in the fourth quarter. Dollar revenue growth contracted by 4% forcing the company to miss its full year growth guidance. The IT major is also expecting growth to remain subdued in the entire financial year. Remma Tendulkar is here with the fine print of the Infosys numbers.
Remma, thanks so much for that. Let me give you the key points from Infosys' numbers. One, for the March quarter a big revenue miss. The company's topline has declined by 3.5% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, lower than street expectations. The good part is the company is giving us a guidance. They are saying in FY26 revenue growth will be 0 to 3%, slightly lower than the 1 to 4% that the street analysts were hoping for. But you know, the environment is uncertain but the management did say that at the lower end of the guidance which is 0% they are baking in some deterioration in the macro, at the upper end that's 3% they're assuming the macros remain stable or slight improvement. Margin guidance remains unchanged at 20 to 22%. But back to Q4 now. Q4 was very weak for the company at least in terms of the top line at minus 3.5% revenue growth. It's also lower than peers and because of that the company has missed achieving its FY25 guidance. They end FY25 with a topline growth of 4.2% lower than the 4.5 to 5% that they guided for. That said their margin defense has been strong. The company's EBIT margins were at 21%, very modest decline on a sequential basis but considering the negative topline growth, it's a strong performance on the margin front. Deals too have inched up by 4-5% on a sequential basis at $2.6 billion. So on the whole, it's a muted Q4. The guidance is slightly lower than street expectations but the guidance shouldn't come as a surprise based on the commentary that we've heard from the management and the street will take comfort from the deal wins and even the margin performance.
All right, Remma, we leave it at that. Thanks very much for joining in. Now while addressing the media earlier the Infosys CEO and MD Salil Parekh commented on deal wins made by the company and how that is expected to roll out despite the looming uncertainty. Take a look.
In terms of mega deals we had two mega deals in the last financial year. We have a pipeline of mega deals today. What is sort of what we saw in the past when things of this nature happen which is changes in the environment. There's also an interest with clients on cost takeout, automation and efficiency and consolidation. We will see how it plays out because it's only a few days as clients have looked at it but we have seen large deals moving which we have closed moving into the next phases as was evident.
Now Indigo is aiming to increase its international capacity to 40% this year says CEO Peter Elbers. Now speaking to Shireen Bhan, Elbers welcomed a grievance redressal body for customers on airfares but he also called for correlation between the cost of doing business and airfares. Now the Indigo CEO also warned about the rising airport fee saying it runs the risk of tipping over. Take a look.
The Indigo international network chain started some years back, very traditional if you wish, between India and the Gulf and the Middle East countries. We've been slowly expanding that. So in '23 we started flights into Central Asia. We started flights into Nairobi. We have moved and I had a meeting earlier this week with the CEO of Changi airport. We moved from moving into Singapore from three Indian cities to nine today. So but that's still within that 5 to 6 hour radius. I think the next step for Indigo is to make sure that even Europe and further parts of Asia would be accessible directly operated by Indigo. And you know, if India is going to be the third largest economy in the world by '27, the country needs and deserves actually an airline of the size and scale and potential of the nation.
We once again seen the parliamentary panel recommend the possibility of looking at intervening in the market as far as prices are concerned. We've now got the government setting up a special cell where customers can actually talk about their complaints as far as pricing is concerned. Would you worry about the possibility of government intervention on pricing at this point in time?
Well, when there's a body where customers can complain about certain things, I think that's a good thing. There's always good for companies to have a body which keeps sort of things in balance and things. So I think in general to have a body like that is a good thing. Having said that, looking at the Indian market, it's one of the most, if not the most, competitive market in the world. The average price levels are extremely competitive. There has been some recent reports which made a comparison how did inflation go over the years and how did airfares go and actually you could see that the inflation has gone much much faster than the airfare. We need to catch up in that in efficiency and sort of in order to keep the margins because in the long run there must be a correlation between the cost of doing business and the price of airfares, right? Otherwise you'll be out of business. Looking at the price sensitivity, a few hundred of rupees sometimes is enough to have people flying or not flying. So we should be mindful of looking how these user fees will eventually find their way into ticket prices because at the end of the day there's a correlation between what is the price and the cost price of a product and what is the price for the consumer eventually. So full support for all the changes. I think it's important that it's being done but we should be mindful that at the end of the day the price of the ticket is based on different elements and this aspect is an important part of that and that should be in line with it.
Is it in line with what you believe is the kind of threshold or do you believe it's tipped over?
I think at some points it runs the risk of tipping over. You know, if you take the price of a ticket, the price of some of the UDFs should in terms of percentage and correlation should be not too much as a total price of the ticket, right? There's going to be fuel and flying and this and that and the other. So I think again full support for all the changes we're making but we should be mindful of what would it do eventually for the total ticket prices.
All right. Now OpenAI has launched new AI reasoning models o3 and o4 mini products which are developer focused with an improvement in coding abilities. Now ChatGPT is also gaining immense traction in India with users tripling in 2024 to become OpenAI's second largest global market. Now as part of our global dialogue series CNBC TV18, Shireen Bhan spoke with Kevin Weil, the chief product officer at OpenAI to discuss their plans for the Indian market and the Ghibli image generation tool which has gone viral in the country. Take a look.
Let me start by asking you Kevin to give us a snapshot in very simple language. What does ChatGPT 4.1 mean for OpenAI and for consumers and how do o3 and o4 mini change the game?
Yeah. Well, first of all thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here with you. India is an incredibly important market for OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's our second largest market. It's our fastest growing market and it's also the market where we saw our image generation just take off. But we had some great launches this week. You mentioned GPT 4.1 which was a model for developers that is fantastic at coding and complex instruction following. And so for that, that was a model that we released focused on developers and we're seeing them, we have over three million developers on the OpenAI platform and they're doing amazing things. That is one of our fastest growing models by usage ever. And then just this morning in the US we launched o3 and o4 mini which are our frontier reasoning models. They're the smartest, fastest, safest models that we have ever launched. They're incredible at things like computer programming. So if you look at measures like on competitive coding benchmarks, these models would be better at competitive coding than all but about 200 people in the world. And they can answer hard PhD level science questions better than 80% of PhDs in their field across all fields simultaneously. So they're really very intelligent models but you can also use them for more mundane tasks, understanding medical jargon or looking at what's happening in the world, creating images, helping you with writing, translating languages. You know, these models are so dynamic and we're super excited to see what people can do with them.
Let's talk about what you're seeing in India. You talked about how it is today your fastest growing market for ChatGPT. How many active users do you have in India? What surprised you about the adoption, the rate of adoption, the pace of adoption in India? Why do you believe you've seen this kind of an uptick here?
Yeah, I mean our active users in India tripled, more than tripled in 2024. So it's been incredible to watch. A few weeks ago we launched a new image generation tool using AI to generate incredibly images that you can control to a great degree, whether you want them to be vivid and lifelike or cartoony or following a particular style. We saw Prime Minister Modi tweet using our image gen feature. We had cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar tweet images from ChatGPT and it just took off. I mean, unlike anything I've ever seen. I've been fortunate to be at Twitter for many years. I led product at Instagram for a number of years. I mean, these companies were growing very quickly. I have never seen anything grow like ChatGPT was growing because people were having so much fun creating these images, sharing them with their friends on WhatsApp and in other places. And it's just incredible to see. So we marshaled a whole lot of resources. We really tried to support it, especially in India. We released new features around our image gen like image galleries that let you quickly view all of the images that you've created. There's just a huge amount of excitement in India for ChatGPT and not just for this image gen feature but also ChatGPT speaks 100 languages, it can teach you any subject you want to learn, it can save you time at home and at work. And so it's just so broadly useful and it's completely free. You don't have to pay us a dime. You can use it on an Android phone for free. So it's just, we deeply believe in bringing AI to the world and the positive impacts that can make. And I can't think of a better example than what's happening in India right now with ChatGPT.
All right, on that note we're going to wrap up this special edition of Earnings Central. More news and updates will continue right here on CNBC TV18. For now, it's a goodbye. Thank you for watching.
Fourth quarter numbers beat street estimates with profits up about 6.7% and net interest income up 10.3% over the previous year. Asset quality improved while the net interest margins on total assets came in at a seven quarter high. Abhishek Kotari is joining in with the numbers.
Well, HDFC Bank reported its Q4 FY25 numbers. The numbers were strong especially on the core operating profit growth which was up more than 20% YoY and about 4.9% on a sequential basis. So take a look at the net interest margin on total assets. It's at a 7 quarter high of about 3.54% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Now this has a one-off of about 7 to 8 basis points with respect to net interest margin. So even then it comes down to 3.46% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Analysts were estimating a decline in net interest margin. However, they have expanded without including even the one-off income over there. Take a look at the cost to income ratio. It's at a 4 quarter low of 39.8% versus 40.6% in the previous quarter. The annualized quarterly slippage ratio is at a 5 quarter low coming in at 1.15% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. Overall the slippages have declined nearly 15% on a quarter-on-quarter basis which is heartening to see. Their asset quality remains impeccable and continues to improve with one of the best in the industry. A gross NPA ratio is at 1.3% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. The net NPA ratio has also declined by three basis points on a sequential basis. The other key highlights being the net interest income growth is about 10.3% YoY and about 4.6% sequentially. They have been able to command better because the loan growth is at just 5.5% YoY and about 4% sequentially. The OPEX has remained under control for them which has helped the operating profit growth. OPEX have declined by 2.3% YoY and grown by only 2.6% quarter-on-quarter. Overall the provisions are down 76.5% YoY but they have increased by just 1.2% sequentially. So PAT is a growth of 6.7% YoY and about 5.3% quarter-on-quarter overall. Good sense, good numbers coming in from HDFC Bank especially on the core operating profit growth. Back to you.
Well, the other big lender ICICI Bank reported a mixed set of numbers with business momentum slowing down while profitability was above street estimates. Abhishek, tell us more on that front.
Mixed set of numbers coming in from ICICI Bank. Weak with respect to business momentum that you are seeing for them while the P&L continues to remain strong for them. Take a look at the deposit growth, 14% YoY and about 5.9% sequentially. YoY it's the weakest deposit growth that you are seeing in last eight quarters. Now advances growth is at 13.3% YoY and just 2.1% quarter-on-quarter. So YoY this 13.3% growth is the weakest that you are seeing in last 17 quarters and sequentially it's one of the weakest loan growth that you are seeing in last 15 quarters. So loan growth remains very weak for them compared to their historical numbers. The net interest margin is at a 5 quarter high of 4.41% versus 4.25%. The core operating profit growth is at a 5 quarter high of 13.7% YoY and 5.5% sequentially. The quarterly annualized slippage ratio, that's heartening to see. It's a 17 quarter low of 1.5% versus 1.85% in the previous quarter. Their asset quality continues to improve and remains one of the best that you are seeing in last 10 years or even more. Gross NPA ratio down to 1.67% versus 1.96% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio down to 0.39% versus 0.42% in the previous quarter. So asset quality and P&L gets a thumbs up while weak business momentum of weak loan growth actually impacts the balance sheet. Back to you.
All right. And finally, Yes Bank also reported its fourth quarter numbers where net profits saw a 63% rise on a year-on-year basis. Take us through the details, Abhishek.
Well, control over cost of funds has actually held the net interest margin and the P&L of Yes Bank in this quarter. So take a look at the P&L versus Apollo. The NII has a beat of 4.3% while the PAT beat is about 23.5%. Net interest margin is at an 8 quarter high of 2.5%. The loan growth is very weak, one of the weakest that you are seeing in last seven quarters, just 8.1% YoY and about 0.55% sequentially. The securities receipts are now nil, so basically they are now zero. Other income has also aided the topline growth for them. So other income is up 15% quarter-on-quarter as fee income is up 21.5% on a sequential basis. So overall the loan growth was weak but they made up in the fees. Fee income was very strong for them. So cost to income ratio hence is at the lowest in last 15 quarters coming in at 67.3% versus 71.1% in the previous quarter as OPEX has declined by more than 4% YoY. Annualized slippage ratio is at a 10 quarter low coming in at less than 2%, 1.99% versus 2.2% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio is one of the lowest that you are seeing in last 8 years or even more. Net NPA ratio is now down to 0.3% versus 0.5% in the previous quarter. A quarterly annualized credit cost is at a 4 quarter high of 1.48% versus 1.26% in the previous quarter. Looks like there might have been a bit of write off which caused provisioning this time around. Return ratios, they are one of the best for the bank in last 25 quarters but one of the weakest when you see with respect to peers are performing because return ratios continues to remain tepid when compared to peers but one of the best in 25 quarters. RoA at 7% versus 6% in the previous quarter. RoE at 6.2% when compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter.
Thanks very much. Let's cut across to HDFC Bank's earnings con-call being addressed by their CFO Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
Driven by favorable monsoon and increased rabi sowing, well for strong agricultural performance. This would be further supported by gradually improving manufacturing sector and steady service sector output. As we look forward for FY26, we expect GDP growth to sustain, supported by pick up in rural discretionary consumer demand, investment activity and multiplier effect of the income tax reduction and RBI repo cut boost to aggregate demand along with providing durable liquidity to the system. We acknowledge that the global macro environment outlook has become more uncertain due to the recent tariff related measures and volatility surrounding them. This may potentially impact global inflation leading to lower growth across economies. As we see it, corporates have adopted a wait and watch stance as we're waiting for more clarity. We remain watchful in this area.
Getting to the deposits. Robust deposit franchise powered by vast distribution strength and strong 97 million customer relationships has grown our deposits to 27.1 trillion. 1.5 trillion growth in the quarter, 5.9% or 3.3 trillion in 12 months period last year, growing at a rate of 14.1%. On an average basis on the deposits, we've seen growth of 15.8% year-on-year. Savings deposits also grew by 249 billion or 4.1% sequentially. Overall CASA deposits entered the quarter at 9.4 trillion, growth of 0.7 trillion in the quarter, resulting in CASA ratio of 34.8% compared to 34% in December. Term deposits aggregating to rupees 17.7 trillion as of March end, 0.8 trillion or 4.7% during the quarter and 3 trillion rupees or 20.3% year-on-year. On the branch network, we added 312 branches during the quarter and 717 branches over the past 12 months. We added 1.8 million new liability relationships. We worked on rebalancing the funding profile with better mix of deposits and lowering borrowing resulting in a CD ratio of 96.5% coming down from 104.4% in prior year. Borrowing mix is now at 14% of total liabilities versus 18% at the end of prior year.
In terms of loans, assets advances under management as of March end at 27.7 trillion grew by 0.9 trillion or 3.3% during the quarter and 2 trillion rupees over the prior year on an average AUM growth of 7.3% year-over-year. Getting to capital strength, our capital adequacy ratio is 19.6% with the CET1 at 17.2% and balance sheet remains resilient with an average LCR of about 119%.
Strong revenues with a resilient NIM. Revenues were at 441 billion for the quarter and for the year at 1,683 billion. Net interest margin remained in a rangebound and grew by 10% over prior year at 321 billion. The margin on a reported basis was 3.54% and on a core basis 3.46%. On an interest earning asset basis, the reported margin was at 3.73%. Now getting to operating expenses, for the quarter operating expenses at 176 billion, up by 2.6% over prior quarter. Expenses remained best-in-class at 1.9% of total assets and cost to income was at 39.8%.
Getting to credit, asset quality is a key strength and a differentiator and it remains pristine. The GNPA ratio was at 1.33% as compared to 1.42% in prior quarter. GNPA ratio excluding NPS in agricultural segment was 1.13% prior quarter 1.19%. Now getting to the total provisions were at about 32 billion and for the quarter prior quarter was also at about 32 billion. The total provisions coverage was at 68%. Total provisions coverage excluding agriculture was at 71%. Talk of provisions, contingent and floating provisions were approximately rupees 259 billion, contingent at 135 billion and floating provisions at 124 billion. General provisions were 109 billion. Total provisions comprising specific, floating, contingent and general were about 172% of gross non-performing loans. This is in addition to securities held as collateral in several of the cases. The annualized credit cost ratio for the quarter was at 48 basis points. Prior quarter was at 50 basis points. Net profit after tax for the quarter was 176 billion and net profit after tax for the full year was 673 billion and grew by 10.7% over prior year.
Now getting to the closing, as liquidity and economic growth improves, we are well placed to grow both in deposits and loans. Deposits as I mentioned grew 15.8% over prior year and loans momentum as seen in the sequential growth was at 3.3% sequential growth which works to about the annualized rate of about 12 to 13%. This delivers a return on assets in the quarter about 1.94% and return on equity of about 14.4%. The earnings per share in the quarter, quarterly earnings per share 23 rupees at the bank standalone level and 24.6 rupees at consolidated bank level. The book value per share on a standalone bank is rupees 655 and at the consolidated bank is at about rupees 681.9. I do want to point out to the dividend that has been, dividends, board of directors recommended a dividend of rupees 22 per equity share of rupees 1 for the year ended March 31, 2025. This will be subject to the approval of shareholders at the ensuing annual general meeting. Thank you. Thanks to our employees for the remarkable performance. With that may I request the operator to open up the line for questions.
All right. That was the HDFC Bank CFO on the bank's fourth quarter numbers that beat estimates on both the top line and the bottom line. On that note we're going to have to slip into a short break but don't go anywhere. We're back in just a moment with more news and updates.
Welcome back. Now on to some more earnings. Infosys missed estimates in the fourth quarter. Dollar revenue growth contracted by 4% forcing the company to miss its full year growth guidance. The IT major is also expecting growth to remain subdued in the entire financial year. Remma Tendulkar is here with the fine print of the Infosys numbers.
Remma, thanks so much for that. Let me give you the key points from Infosys' numbers. One, for the March quarter a big revenue miss. The company's topline has declined by 3.5% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, lower than street expectations. The good part is the company is giving us a guidance. They are saying in FY26 revenue growth will be 0 to 3%, slightly lower than the 1 to 4% that the street analysts were hoping for. But you know, the environment is uncertain but the management did say that at the lower end of the guidance which is 0% they are baking in some deterioration in the macro, at the upper end that's 3% they're assuming the macros remain stable or slight improvement. Margin guidance remains unchanged at 20 to 22%. But back to Q4 now. Q4 was very weak for the company at least in terms of the top line at minus 3.5% revenue growth. It's also lower than peers and because of that the company has missed achieving its FY25 guidance. They end FY25 with a topline growth of 4.2% lower than the 4.5 to 5% that they guided for. That said their margin defense has been strong. The company's EBIT margins were at 21%, very modest decline on a sequential basis but considering the negative topline growth, it's a strong performance on the margin front. Deals too have inched up by 4-5% on a sequential basis at $2.6 billion. So on the whole, it's a muted Q4. The guidance is slightly lower than street expectations but the guidance shouldn't come as a surprise based on the commentary that we've heard from the management and the street will take comfort from the deal wins and even the margin performance.
All right, Remma, we leave it at that. Thanks very much for joining in. Now while addressing the media earlier the Infosys CEO and MD Salil Parekh commented on deal wins made by the company and how that is expected to roll out despite the looming uncertainty. Take a look.
In terms of mega deals we had two mega deals in the last financial year. We have a pipeline of mega deals today. What is sort of what we saw in the past when things of this nature happen which is changes in the environment. There's also an interest with clients on cost takeout, automation and efficiency and consolidation. We will see how it plays out because it's only a few days as clients have looked at it but we have seen large deals moving which we have closed moving into the next phases as was evident.
Now Indigo is aiming to increase its international capacity to 40% this year says CEO Peter Elbers. Now speaking to Shireen Bhan, Elbers welcomed a grievance redressal body for customers on airfares but he also called for correlation between the cost of doing business and airfares. Now the Indigo CEO also warned about the rising airport fee saying it runs the risk of tipping over. Take a look.
The Indigo international network chain started some years back, very traditional if you wish, between India and the Gulf and the Middle East countries. We've been slowly expanding that. So in '23 we started flights into Central Asia. We started flights into Nairobi. We have moved and I had a meeting earlier this week with the CEO of Changi airport. We moved from moving into Singapore from three Indian cities to nine today. So but that's still within that 5 to 6 hour radius. I think the next step for Indigo is to make sure that even Europe and further parts of Asia would be accessible directly operated by Indigo. And you know, if India is going to be the third largest economy in the world by '27, the country needs and deserves actually an airline of the size and scale and potential of the nation.
We once again seen the parliamentary panel recommend the possibility of looking at intervening in the market as far as prices are concerned. We've now got the government setting up a special cell where customers can actually talk about their complaints as far as pricing is concerned. Would you worry about the possibility of government intervention on pricing at this point in time?
Well, when there's a body where customers can complain about certain things, I think that's a good thing. There's always good for companies to have a body which keeps sort of things in balance and things. So I think in general to have a body like that is a good thing. Having said that, looking at the Indian market, it's one of the most, if not the most, competitive market in the world. The average price levels are extremely competitive. There has been some recent reports which made a comparison how did inflation go over the years and how did airfares go and actually you could see that the inflation has gone much much faster than the airfare. We need to catch up in that in efficiency and sort of in order to keep the margins because in the long run there must be a correlation between the cost of doing business and the price of airfares, right? Otherwise you'll be out of business. Looking at the price sensitivity, a few hundred of rupees sometimes is enough to have people flying or not flying. So we should be mindful of looking how these user fees will eventually find their way into ticket prices because at the end of the day there's a correlation between what is the price and the cost price of a product and what is the price for the consumer eventually. So full support for all the changes. I think it's important that it's being done but we should be mindful that at the end of the day the price of the ticket is based on different elements and this aspect is an important part of that and that should be in line with it.
Is it in line with what you believe is the kind of threshold or do you believe it's tipped over?
I think at some points it runs the risk of tipping over. You know, if you take the price of a ticket, the price of some of the UDFs should in terms of percentage and correlation should be not too much as a total price of the ticket, right? There's still going to be fuel and flying and this and that and the other. So I think again full support for all the changes we're making but we should be mindful of what would it do eventually for the total ticket prices.
All right. Now OpenAI has launched new AI reasoning models o3 and o4 mini products which are developer focused with an improvement in coding abilities. Now ChatGPT is also gaining immense traction in India with users tripling in
2024 to become OpenAI's second largest global market. Now as part of our global dialogue series, CNBC TV18's Shireen Bhan spoke with Kevin Weil, the Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, to discuss their plans for the Indian market and the Ghibli image generation tool which has gone viral in the country. Take a look.
Let me start by asking you, Kevin, to give us a snapshot in very simple language. What does ChatGPT 4.1 mean for OpenAI and for consumers, and how do o3 and o4-mini change the game?
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here with you. India is an incredibly important market for OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's our second largest market, it's our fastest growing market, and it's also the market where we saw our image generation just take off. But we had some great launches this week. You mentioned GPT 4.1, which was a model for developers that is fantastic at coding and complex instruction following. And so, you know, that was a model that we released focused on developers, and we're seeing them, you know, we have over three million developers on the OpenAI platform and they're doing amazing things. That is one of our fastest growing models by usage ever. And then just this morning in the US, we launched o3 and o4-mini, which are our frontier reasoning models. They're the smartest, fastest, safest models that we have ever launched. They're incredible at things like computer programming. So if you look at measures like on competitive coding benchmarks, these models would be better at competitive coding than all but about 200 people in the world. And they can answer hard PhD-level science questions better than 80% of PhDs in their field across all fields simultaneously. So they're really very intelligent models, but you can also use them for, you know, more mundane tasks: understanding medical jargon or looking at what's happening in the world, creating images, helping you with writing, translating languages. You know, these models are so dynamic and we're super excited to see what people can do with them.
Let's talk about what you're seeing in India. You talked about how it is today your fastest growing market for ChatGPT. You know, how many active users do you have in India? What surprised you about the adoption, the rate of adoption, the pace of adoption in India? Why do you believe you've seen this kind of an uptick here?
Yeah, I mean, our active users in India tripled, more than tripled in 2024. So it's been incredible to watch. We a few weeks ago launched a new image generation tool using AI to generate incredibly, you know, images that you can control to a great degree, whether you want them to be vivid and lifelike or cartoony or following a particular style. We saw, you know, Prime Minister Modi tweet using our image gen feature. We had cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar tweet images from ChatGPT and it just took off. I mean, unlike anything I've ever seen. I've been fortunate to be at Twitter for many years, I led product at Instagram for a number of years. I mean, these companies were growing very quickly. I have never seen anything grow like ChatGPT was growing because people were having so much fun creating these images, sharing them with their friends, you know, on WhatsApp and in other places. And it's just incredible to see. So we marshaled a whole lot of resources, we really tried to support it, especially in India. We released new features around our image gen, like image galleries that let you quickly view all of the images that you've created. There's just a huge amount of excitement in India for ChatGPT, and not just for this image gen feature, but also, you know, ChatGPT speaks 100 languages, it can teach you any subject you want to learn, it can save you time at home and at work. And so, you know, it's just so broadly useful and it's completely free. You don't have to pay us a dime. You can use it on an Android phone for free. So it's just, you know, we deeply believe in bringing AI to the world and the positive impacts that that can make. And I can't think of a better example than, you know, what's happening in India right now with ChatGPT.
All right, on that note, we're going to wrap up this special edition of Earning Central. More news and updates will continue right here on CNBC TV18. For now, it's goodbye. Thank you for watching.
Fourth quarter numbers beat street estimates with profits up about 6.7% and net interest income up 10.3% over the previous year. Asset quality improved while the net interest margins on total assets came in at a seven-quarter high. Abhishek Kotari is joining in with the numbers.
Well, HDFC Bank reported its Q4 FY25 numbers. The numbers were strong, especially on the core operating profit growth, which was up more than 20% year-on-year and about 4.9% on a sequential basis. So take a look at the net interest margin on total assets. It's at a seven-quarter high of about 3.54% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Now this has a one-off of about 7 to 8 basis points with respect to net interest margin. So even then it comes down to 3.46% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Analysts were estimating a decline in net interest margin. However, they have expanded without including even the one-off income over there. Take a look at the cost-to-income ratio. It's at a four-quarter low of 39.8% versus 40.6% in the previous quarter. The annualized quarterly slippage ratio is at a five-quarter low, coming in at 1.15% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. Overall, the slippages have declined nearly 15% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, which is heartening to see. Their asset quality remains impeccable and continues to improve, with one of the best in the industry. A gross NPA ratio is at 1.3% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. The net NPA ratio has also declined by three basis points on a sequential basis. The other key highlights being the net interest income growth is about 10.3% year-on-year and about 4.6% sequentially. They have been able to command better because the loan growth is at just 5.5% year-on-year and about 4% sequentially. The OPEX has remained under control for them, which has helped the operating profit growth. OPEX have declined by 2.3% year-on-year and grown by only 2.6% quarter-on-quarter. Overall, the provisions are down 76.5% year-on-year, but they have increased by just 1.2% sequentially. So PAT is a growth of 6.7% year-on-year and about 5.3% quarter-on-quarter overall. Good set of numbers coming in from HDFC Bank, especially on the core operating profit growth. Back to you.
Well, the other big lender, ICICI Bank, reported a mixed set of numbers with business momentum slowing down while profitability was above street estimates. Abhishek, tell us more on that front.
Mixed set of numbers coming in from ICICI Bank. Weak with respect to business momentum that you are seeing for them, while the P&L continues to remain strong for them. Take a look at the deposit growth: 14% year-on-year and about 5.9% sequentially. Year-on-year, it's the weakest deposit growth that you are seeing in the last eight quarters. Now advances growth is at 13.3% year-on-year and just 2.1% quarter-on-quarter. So year-on-year, this 13.3% growth is the weakest that you are seeing in the last 17 quarters, and sequentially it's one of the weakest loan growth that you are seeing in the last 15 quarters. So loan growth remains very weak for them compared to their historical numbers. The net interest margin is at a five-quarter high of 4.41% versus 4.25%. The core operating profit growth is at a five-quarter high of 13.7% year-on-year and 5.5% sequentially. The quarterly annualized slippage ratio, that's heartening to see. It's a 17-quarter low of 1.5% versus 1.85% in the previous quarter. Their asset quality continues to improve and remains one of the best that you are seeing in the last 10 years or even more. Gross NPA ratio down to 1.67% versus 1.96% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio down to 0.39% versus 0.42% in the previous quarter. So asset quality and P&L gets a thumbs up, while weak business momentum of weak loan growth actually impacts the balance sheet. Back to you.
All right. And finally, Yes Bank also reported its fourth quarter numbers where net profits saw a 63% rise on a year-on-year basis. Take us through the details, Abhishek.
Well, control over cost of funds has actually held the net interest margin and the P&L of Yes Bank in this quarter. So take a look at the P&L versus Apollo. The NII has a beat of 4.3% while the PAT beat is about 23.5%. Net interest margin is at an eight-quarter high of 2.5%. The loan growth is very weak, one of the weakest that you are seeing in the last seven quarters, just 8.1% year-on-year and about 0.55% sequentially. The securities receipts are now nil, so basically they are now zero. Other income has also aided the topline growth for them. So other income is up 15% quarter-on-quarter as fee income is up 21.5% on a sequential basis. So overall, the loan growth was weak, but they made up in the fees. Fee income was very strong for them. So cost-to-income ratio hence is at the lowest in the last 15 quarters, coming in at 67.3% versus 71.1% in the previous quarter as OPEX has declined by more than 4% year-on-year. Annualized slippage ratio is at a 10-quarter low, coming in at less than 2%, 1.99% versus 2.2% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio is one of the lowest that you are seeing in the last eight years or even more. Net NPA ratio is now down to 0.3% versus 0.5% in the previous quarter. A quarterly annualized credit cost is at a four-quarter high of 1.48% versus 1.26% in the previous quarter. Looks like there might have been a bit of write-off which caught provisioning this time around. Return ratios, they are one of the best for the bank in the last 25 quarters, but one of the weakest when you see with respect to peers, underperforming because return ratios continue to remain tepid when compared to peers. But one of the best in 25 quarters: ROA at 7% versus 6% in the previous quarter, ROE at 6.2% when compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter.
Thanks very much. Let's cut across to HDFC Bank's earnings con-call being addressed by their CFO, Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
Driven by favorable monsoon and increased Rabi sowings, augur well for strong agricultural performance. This would be further supported by gradually improving manufacturing sector and steady service sector output. As we look forward for FY26, we expect GDP growth to sustain, supported by pickup in rural discretionary consumer demand, investment activity, and multiplier effect of the income tax reduction and RBI repo cut boost to aggregate demand along with providing durable liquidity to the system. We acknowledge that the global macro environment outlook has become more uncertain due to the recent tariff-related measures and volatility surrounding them. This may potentially impact global inflation, leading to lower growth across economies. As we see it, corporates have adopted a wait-and-watch stance as we're waiting for more clarity. We remain watchful in this area.
Getting to the deposits. Robust deposit franchise powered by vast distribution strength and strong 97 million customer relationships has grown our deposits to 27.1 trillion. 1.5 trillion growth in the quarter, 5.9% or 3.3 trillion in 12 months period last year, growing at a rate of 14.1%. On an average basis on the deposits, we've seen growth of 15.8% year-on-year. Savings deposits also grew by 249 billion or 4.1% sequentially. Overall CASA deposits entered the quarter at 9.4 trillion, growth of 0.7 trillion in the quarter, resulting in CASA ratio of 34.8% compared to 34% in December. Term deposits aggregating to rupees 17.7 trillion as of March end, 0.8 trillion or 4.7% during the quarter and 3 trillion rupees or 20.3% year-on-year. On the branch network, we added 312 branches during the quarter and 717 branches over the past 12 months. We added 1.8 million new liability relationships. We worked on rebalancing the funding profile with better mix of deposits and lowering borrowing, resulting in a CD ratio of 96.5% coming down from 104.4% in prior year. Borrowing mix is now at 14% of total liabilities versus 18% at the end of prior year.
In terms of loans, assets, advances under management as of March end at 27.7 trillion grew by 0.9 trillion or 3.3% during the quarter and 2 trillion rupees over the prior year. On an average, AUM growth of 7.3% year-over-year. Getting to capital strength, our capital adequacy ratio is 19.6% with the CET1 at 17.2% and balance sheet remains resilient with an average LCR of about 119%.
Strong revenues with resilient NIM. Revenues were at 441 billion for the quarter and for the year at 1,683 billion. Net interest margin remained in a range-bound and grew by 10% over prior year at 321 billion. The margin on a reported basis was 3.54% and on a core basis 3.46%. On an interest-earning asset basis, the reported margin was at 3.73%. Now getting to operating expenses for the quarter, operating expenses at 176 billion, up by 2.6% over prior quarter. Expenses remained best-in-class at 1.9% of total assets and cost-to-income was at 39.8%.
Getting to credit, asset quality is a key strength and a differentiator and it remains pristine. The GNP ratio was at 1.33% as compared to 1.42% in prior quarter. GNPA ratio excluding NPAs in agricultural segment was 1.13%, prior quarter 1.19%. Now getting to the total provisions, were at about 32 billion and for the quarter, prior quarter was also at about 32 billion. The total provisions coverage was at 68%. Total provisions coverage excluding agriculture was at 71%. Stock of provisions, contingent and floating provisions were approximately rupees 259 billion, contingent at 135 billion and floating provisions at 124 billion. General provisions were 109 billion. Total provisions comprising specific, floating, contingent and general were about 172% of gross non-performing loans. This is in addition to securities held as collateral in several of the cases. The annualized credit cost ratio for the quarter was at 48 basis points. Prior quarter was at 50 basis points.
Net profit after tax for the quarter was 176 billion and net profit after tax for the full year was 673 billion and grew by 10.7% over prior year. Now getting to the closing, as liquidity and economic growth improves, we are well placed to grow both in deposits and loans. Deposits, as I mentioned, grew 15.8% over prior year and loans momentum as seen in the sequential growth was at 3.3% sequential growth, which works to about the annualized rate of about 12 to 13%. This delivers a return on assets in the quarter of about 1.94% and return on equity of about 14.4%. The earnings per share in the quarter, quarterly earnings per share 23 rupees at the bank standalone level and 24.6 rupees at consolidated bank level. The book value per share on a standalone bank is rupees 655 and at the consolidated bank is at about rupees 681.9. I do want to point out the dividend that has been, dividends, board of directors recommended a dividend of rupees 22 per equity share of rupees 1 for the year ended March 31, 2025. This will be subject to the approval of shareholders at the ensuing annual general meeting. Thank you. Thanks to our employees for the remarkable performance. With that, may I request the operator to open up the line for questions.
All right. That was the HDFC Bank CFO on the bank's fourth quarter numbers that beat estimates on both the top line and the bottom line. On that note, we're going to have to slip into a short break, but don't go anywhere. We're back in just a moment with more news and updates.
Welcome back. Now on to some more earnings. Infosys missed estimates in the fourth quarter. Dollar revenue growth contracted by 4%, forcing the company to miss its full-year growth guidance. The IT major is also expecting growth to remain subdued in the entire financial year. Remma Tendulkar is here with the fine print of the Infosys numbers. Remma.
Thanks so much for that. So let me give you the key points from Infosys' numbers. One, for the March quarter, a big revenue miss. The company's topline has declined by 3.5% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, lower than street expectations. The good part is the company is giving us a guidance. They are saying in FY26 revenue growth will be 0 to 3%, slightly lower than the 1 to 4% that the street analysts were hoping for. But, you know, the environment is uncertain. But the management did say that at the lower end of the guidance, which is 0%, they are baking in some deterioration in the macro. At the upper end, that's 3%, they're assuming the macros remain stable or slight improvement. Margin guidance remains unchanged at 20 to 22%. But back to Q4 now. Q4 was very weak for the company, at least in terms of the topline at minus 3.5% revenue growth. It's also lower than peers and because of that the company has missed achieving its FY25 guidance. They end FY25 with a topline growth of 4.2%, lower than the 4.5 to 5% that they guided for. That said, their margin defense has been strong. The company's EBIT margins were at 21%, very modest decline on a sequential basis, but considering the negative topline growth, it's a strong performance on the margin front. Deal wins too have inched up by 4-5% on a sequential basis at $2.6 billion. So on the whole, it's a muted Q4. The guidance is slightly lower than street expectations, but the guidance shouldn't come as a surprise based on the commentary that we've heard from the management, and the street will take comfort from the deal wins and even the margin performance.
All right, Remma, we leave it at that. Thanks very much for joining in. Now, while addressing the media earlier, the Infosys CEO and MD, Salil Parekh, commented on deal wins made by the company and how that is expected to roll out despite the looming uncertainty. Take a look.
In terms of mega deals, we had two mega deals in the last financial year. We have a pipeline of mega deals today. What is sort of what we saw in the past when things of this nature happen, which is changes in the environment, there's also an interest with clients on cost takeout, automation and efficiency and consolidation. We will see how it plays out because it's only a few days as clients have looked at it, but we have seen large deals moving in which we have closed moving into the next phases as was evident.
Now IndiGo is aiming to increase its international capacity to 40% this year, says CEO Peter Elbers. Now speaking to Shireen Bhan, Elbers welcomed a grievance redressal body for customers on airfares, but he also called for correlation between the cost of doing business and airfares. Now, the IndiGo CEO also warned about the rising airport fee, saying it runs the risk of tipping over. Take a look.
The IndiGo international network chain started some years back, very traditional if you wish, between India and the Gulf and the Middle East countries. We've been slowly, slowly expanding that. So in '23 we started flights into Central Asia, we started flights into Nairobi. We have moved, and I had a meeting earlier this week with the CEO of Changi Airport, we moved from moving into Singapore from three Indian cities to nine today. So, but that's still within that 5 to 6 hour radius. I think the next step for IndiGo is to make sure that even Europe and further parts of Asia would be accessible directly operated by IndiGo. And, you know, if India is going to be the third largest economy in the world by '27, the country needs and deserves actually an airline of the size and scale and potential of the nation.
We've once again seen the parliamentary panel recommend the possibility of looking at intervening in the market as far as prices are concerned. We've now got the government setting up a special cell where customers can actually talk about their complaints as far as pricing is concerned. Would you worry about the possibility of government intervention on pricing at this point in time when there's a body where customers can complain about certain things?
I think that's a good thing. There's always good for companies to have a body which keeps sort of things in balance. So I think in general to have a body like that is a good thing. Having said that, looking at the Indian market, it's one of the most, if not the most, competitive market in the world. The average price levels are extremely competitive. There has been some recent reports which made a comparison how did inflation go over the years and how did airfares go, and actually you could see that the inflation has gone much, much faster than the airfare. So we need to catch up in that, in efficiency and sort of in order to keep the margins, because in the long run there must be a correlation between the cost of doing business and the price of airfares, right? Otherwise you'll be out of business. Looking at the price sensitivity, a few hundred of rupees sometimes is enough to have people flying or not flying. So we should be mindful of looking how these user fees will eventually find their way into ticket prices, because at the end of the day there's a correlation between what is the price and the cost price of a product and what is the price for the consumer eventually. So full support for all the changes, I think it's important that it's being done, but we should be mindful that, you know, at the end of the day the price of the ticket is based on different elements and this aspect is an important part of that and that should be in line with it.
Is it in line with what you believe is the kind of threshold or do you believe it's tipped over?
I think at some points it runs the risk of tipping over. You know, if you take the price of a ticket, the price of some of the UDFs should, in terms of percentage and correlation, should be not too much as a total price of the ticket, right? There's still going to be fuel and flying and this and that and the other. So I think again, full support for all the changes we're making, but we should be mindful of what would it do eventually for the total ticket prices.
All right. Now OpenAI has launched new AI reasoning models o3 and o4-mini, products which are developer-focused with an improvement in coding abilities. Now ChatGPT is also gaining immense traction in India with users tripling in 2024 to become OpenAI's second largest global market. Now as part of our global dialogue series, CNBC TV18's Shireen Bhan spoke with Kevin Weil, the Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, to discuss their plans for the Indian market and the Ghibli image generation tool which has gone viral in the country. Take a look.
Let me start by asking you, Kevin, to give us a snapshot in very simple language. What does ChatGPT 4.1 mean for OpenAI and for consumers, and how do o3 and o4-mini change the game?
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here with you. India is an incredibly important market for OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's our second largest market, it's our fastest growing market, and it's also the market where we saw our image generation just take off. But we had some great launches this week. You mentioned GPT 4.1, which was a model for developers that is fantastic at coding and complex instruction following. And so, you know, that was a model that we released focused on developers, and we're seeing them, you know, we have over three million developers on the OpenAI platform and they're doing amazing things. That is one of our fastest growing models by usage ever. And then just this morning in the US, we launched o3 and o4-mini, which are our frontier reasoning models. They're the smartest, fastest, safest models that we have ever launched. They're incredible at things like computer programming. So if you look at measures like on competitive coding benchmarks, these models would be better at competitive coding than all but about 200 people in the world. And they can answer hard PhD-level science questions better than 80% of PhDs in their field across all fields simultaneously. So they're really very intelligent models, but you can also use them for, you know, more mundane tasks: understanding medical jargon or looking at what's happening in the world, creating images, helping you with writing, translating languages. You know, these models are so dynamic and we're super excited to see what people can do with them.
Let's talk about what you're seeing in India. You talked about how it is today your fastest growing market for ChatGPT. You know, how many active users do you have in India? What surprised you about the adoption, the rate of adoption, the pace of adoption in India? Why do you believe you've seen this kind of an uptick here?
Yeah, I mean, our active users in India tripled, more than tripled in 2024. So it's been incredible to watch. We a few weeks ago launched a new image generation tool using AI to generate incredibly, you know, images that you can control to a great degree, whether you want them to be vivid and lifelike or cartoony or following a particular style. We saw, you know, Prime Minister Modi tweet using our image gen feature. We had cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar tweet images from ChatGPT and it just took off. I mean, unlike anything I've ever seen. I've been fortunate to be at Twitter for many years, I led product at Instagram for a number of years. I mean, these companies were growing very quickly. I have never seen anything grow like ChatGPT was growing because people were having so much fun creating these images, sharing them with their friends, you know, on WhatsApp and in other places. And it's just incredible to see. So we marshaled a whole lot of resources, we really tried to support it, especially in India. We released new features around our image gen, like image galleries that let you quickly view all of the images that you've created. There's just a huge amount of excitement in India for ChatGPT, and not just for this image gen feature, but also, you know, ChatGPT speaks 100 languages, it can teach you any subject you want to learn, it can save you time at home and at work. And so, you know, it's just so broadly useful and it's completely free. You don't have to pay us a dime. You can use it on an Android phone for free. So it's just, you know, we deeply believe in bringing AI to the world and the positive impacts that that can make. And I can't think of a better example than, you know, what's happening in India right now with ChatGPT.
All right, on that note, we're going to wrap up this special edition of Earning Central. More news and updates will continue right here on CNBC TV18. For now, it's a goodbye. Thank you for watching.
Quarter numbers beat street estimates with profits up about 6.7% and net interest income up 10.3% over the previous year. Asset quality improved while the net interest margins on total assets came in at a seven-quarter high. Abhishek Kotari is joining in with the numbers.
Well, HDFC Bank reported its Q4 FY25 numbers. Numbers were strong, especially on the core operating profit growth, which was up more than 20% year-on-year and about 4.9% on a sequential basis. So take a look at the net interest margin on total assets. It's at a seven-quarter high of about 3.54% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Now this has a one-off of about 7 to 8 basis points with respect to net interest margin. So even then it comes down to 3.46% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Analysts were estimating a decline in net interest margin. However, they have expanded without including even the one-off income over there. Take a look at the cost-to-income ratio. It's at a four-quarter low of 39.8% versus 40.6% in the previous quarter. The annualized quarterly slippage ratio is at a five-quarter low, coming in at 1.15% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. Overall, the slippages have declined nearly 15% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, which is heartening to see. Their asset quality remains impeccable and continues to improve, with one of the best in the industry. A gross NPA ratio is at 1.3% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. The net NPA ratio has also declined by three basis points on a sequential basis. The other key highlights being the net interest income growth is about 10.3% year-on-year and about 4.6% sequentially. They have been able to command better because the loan growth is at just 5.5% year-on-year and about 4% sequentially. The OPEX has remained under control for them, which has helped the operating profit growth. OPEX have declined by 2.3% year-on-year and grown by only 2.6% quarter-on-quarter. Overall, the provisions are down 76.5% year-on-year, but they have increased by just 1.2% sequentially. So PAT is a growth of 6.7% year-on-year and about 5.3% quarter-on-quarter overall. Good set of numbers coming in from HDFC Bank, especially on the core operating profit growth. Back to you.
Well, the other big lender, ICICI Bank, reported a mixed set of numbers with business momentum slowing down while profitability was above street estimates. Abhishek, tell us more on that front.
Mixed set of numbers coming in from ICICI Bank. Weak with respect to business momentum that you are seeing for them, while the P&L continues to remain strong for them. Take a look at the deposit growth: 14% year-on-year and about 5.9% sequentially. Year-on-year, it's the weakest deposit growth that you are seeing in the last eight quarters. Now advances growth is at 13.3% year-on-year and just 2.1% quarter-on-quarter. So year-on-year, this 13.3% growth is the weakest that you are seeing in the last 17 quarters, and sequentially it's one of the weakest loan growth that you are seeing in the last 15 quarters. So loan growth remains very weak for them compared to their historical numbers. The net interest margin is at a five-quarter high of 4.41% versus 4.25%. The core operating profit growth is at a five-quarter high of 13.7% year-on-year and 5.5% sequentially. The quarterly annualized slippage ratio, that's heartening to see. It's a 17-quarter low of 1.5% versus 1.85% in the previous quarter. Their asset quality continues to improve and remains one of the best that you are seeing in the last 10 years or even more. Gross NPA ratio down to 1.67% versus 1.96% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio down to 0.39% versus 0.42% in the previous quarter. So asset quality and P&L gets a thumbs up, while weak business momentum of weak loan growth actually impacts the balance sheet. Back to you.
All right. And finally, Yes Bank also reported its fourth quarter numbers where net profits saw a 63% rise on a year-on-year basis. Take us through the details, Abhishek.
Well, control over cost of funds has actually held the net interest margin and the P&L of Yes Bank in this quarter. So take a look at the P&L versus Apollo. The NII has a beat of 4.3% while the PAT beat is about 23.5%. Net interest margin is at an eight-quarter high of 2.5%. The loan growth is very weak, one of the weakest that you are seeing in the last seven quarters, just 8.1% year-on-year and about 0.55% sequentially. The securities receipts are now nil, so basically they are now zero. Other income has also aided the topline growth for them. So other income is up 15% quarter-on-quarter as fee income is up 21.5% on a sequential basis. So overall, the loan growth was weak, but they made up in the fees. Fee income was very strong for them. So cost-to-income ratio hence is at the lowest in the last 15 quarters, coming in at 67.3% versus 71.1% in the previous quarter as OPEX has declined by more than 4% year-on-year. Annualized slippage ratio is at a 10-quarter low, coming in at less than 2%, 1.99% versus 2.2% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio is one of the lowest that you are seeing in the last eight years or even more. Net NPA ratio is now down to 0.3% versus 0.5% in the previous quarter. A quarterly annualized credit cost is at a four-quarter high of 1.48% versus 1.26% in the previous quarter. Looks like there might have been a bit of write-off which caught provisioning this time around. Return ratios, they are one of the best for the bank in the last 25 quarters, but one of the weakest when you see with respect to peers, underperforming because return ratios continue to remain tepid when compared to peers. But one of the best in 25 quarters: ROA at 7% versus 6% in the previous quarter, ROE at 6.2% when compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter.
Thanks very much. Let's cut across to HDFC Bank's earnings con-call being addressed by their CFO, Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
Driven by favorable monsoon and increased Rabi sowings, augur well for strong agricultural performance. This would be further supported by gradually improving manufacturing sector and steady service sector output. As we look forward for FY26, we expect GDP growth to sustain, supported by pickup in rural discretionary consumer demand, investment activity, and multiplier effect of the income tax reduction and RBI repo cut boost to aggregate demand along with providing durable liquidity to the system. We acknowledge that the global macro environment outlook has become more uncertain due to the recent tariff-related measures and volatility surrounding them. This may potentially impact global inflation, leading to lower growth across economies. As we see it, corporates have adopted a wait-and-watch stance as we are waiting for more clarity. We remain watchful in this area.
Getting to the deposits. Robust deposit franchise powered by vast distribution strength and strong 97 million customer relationships has grown our deposits to 27.1 trillion. 1.5 trillion growth in the quarter, 5.9% or 3.3 trillion in 12 months period last year, growing at the rate of 14.1%. On an average basis on the deposits, we've seen growth of 15.8% year-on-year. Savings deposits also grew by 249 billion or 4.1% sequentially. Overall CASA deposits entered the quarter at 9.4 trillion, growth of 0.7 trillion in the quarter, resulting in CASA ratio of 34.8% compared to 34% in December. Term deposits aggregating to rupees 17.7 trillion as of March end, 0.8 trillion or 4.7% during the quarter and 3 trillion rupees or 20.3% year-on-year. On the branch network, we added 312 branches during the quarter and 717 branches over the past 12 months. We added 1.8 million new liability relationships. We worked on rebalancing the funding profile with better mix of deposits and lowering borrowing, resulting in a CD ratio of 96.5% coming down from 104.4% in prior year. Borrowing mix is now at 14% of total liabilities versus 18% at the end of prior year.
In terms of loans, assets, advances under management as of March end at 27.7 trillion grew by 0.9 trillion or 3.3% during the quarter and 2 trillion rupees over the prior year. On an average, AUM growth of 7.3% year-over-year. Getting to capital strength, our capital adequacy ratio is 19.6% with the CET1 at 17.2% and balance sheet remains resilient with an average LCR of about 119%.
Strong revenues with resilient NIM. Revenues were at 441 billion for the quarter and for the year at 1,683 billion. Net interest margin remained in a range-bound and grew by 10% over prior year at 321 billion. The margin on a reported basis was 3.54% and on a core basis 3.46%. On an interest-earning asset basis, the reported margin was at 3.73%. Now getting to operating expenses for the quarter, operating expenses at 176 billion, up by 2.6% over prior quarter. Expenses remained best-in-class at 1.9% of total assets and cost-to-income was at 39.8%.
Getting to credit, asset quality is a key strength and a differentiator and it remains pristine. The GNP ratio was at 1.33% as compared to 1.42% in prior quarter. GNPA ratio excluding NPAs in agricultural segment was 1.13%, prior quarter 1.19%. Now getting to the total provisions, were at about 32 billion and for the quarter, prior quarter was also at about 32 billion. The total provisions coverage was at 68%. Total provisions coverage excluding agriculture was at 71%. Stock of provisions, contingent and floating provisions were approximately rupees 259 billion, contingent at 135 billion and floating provisions at 124 billion. General provisions were 109 billion. Total provisions comprising specific, floating, contingent and general were about 172% of gross non-performing loans. This is in addition to securities held as collateral in several of the cases. The annualized credit cost ratio for the quarter was at 48 basis points. Prior quarter was at 50 basis points.
Net profit after tax for the quarter was 176 billion and net profit after tax for the full year was 673 billion and grew by 10.7% over prior year. Now getting to the closing, as liquidity and economic growth improves, we are well placed to grow both in deposits and loans. Deposits, as I mentioned, grew 15.8% over prior year and loans momentum as seen in the sequential growth was at 3.3% sequential growth, which works to about the annualized rate of about 12 to 13%. This delivers a return on assets in the quarter of about 1.94% and return on equity of about 14.4%. The earnings per share in the quarter, quarterly earnings per share 23 rupees at the bank standalone level and 24.6 rupees at consolidated bank level. The book value per share on a standalone bank is rupees 655 and at the consolidated bank is at about rupees 681.9. I do want to point out the dividend that has been, dividends, board of directors recommended a dividend of rupees 22 per equity share of rupees 1 for the year ended March 31, 2025. This will be subject to the approval of shareholders at the ensuing annual general meeting. Thank you. Thanks to our employees for the remarkable performance. With that, may I request the operator to open up the line for questions.
All right. That was the HDFC Bank CFO on the bank's fourth quarter numbers that beat estimates on both the top line and the bottom line. On that note, we're going to have to slip into a short break, but don't go anywhere. We're back in just a moment with more news and updates.
Welcome back. Now onto some more earnings. Infosys missed estimates in the fourth quarter. Dollar revenue growth contracted by 4%, forcing the company to miss its full-year growth guidance. The IT major is also expecting growth to remain subdued in the entire financial year. Remma Tendulkar is here with the fine print of the Infosys numbers. Remma.
Thanks so much for that. So let me give you the key points from Infosys' numbers. One, for the March quarter, a big revenue miss. The company's topline has declined by 3.5% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, lower than street expectations. The good part is the company is giving us a guidance. They are saying in FY26 revenue growth will be 0 to 3%, slightly lower than the 1 to 4% that the street analysts were hoping for. But, you know, the environment is uncertain. But the management did say that at the lower end of the guidance, which is 0%, they are baking in some deterioration in the macro. At the upper end, that's 3%, they're assuming the macros remain stable or slight improvement. Margin guidance remains unchanged at 20 to 22%. But back to Q4 now. Q4 was very weak for the company, at least in terms of the topline at minus 3.5% revenue growth. It's also lower than peers and because of that the company has missed achieving its FY25 guidance. They end FY25 with a topline growth of 4.2%, lower than the 4.5 to 5% that they guided for. That said, their margin defense has been strong. The company's EBIT margins were at 21%, very modest decline on a sequential basis, but considering the negative topline growth, it's a strong performance on the margin front. Deal wins too have inched up by 4-5% on a sequential basis at $2.6 billion. So on the whole, it's a muted Q4. The guidance is slightly lower than street expectations, but the guidance shouldn't come as a surprise based on the commentary that we've heard from the management, and the street will take comfort from the deal wins and even the margin performance.
All right, Remma, we leave it at that. Thanks very much for joining in. Now, while addressing the media earlier, the Infosys CEO and MD, Salil Parekh, commented on deal wins made by the company and how that is expected to roll out despite the looming uncertainty. Take a look.
In terms of mega deals, we had two mega deals in the last financial year. We have a pipeline of mega deals today. What is sort of what we saw in the past when things of this nature happen, which is changes in the environment, there's also an interest with clients on cost takeout, automation and efficiency and consolidation. We will see how it plays out because it's only a few days as clients have looked at it, but we have seen large deals moving in which we have closed moving into the next phases as was evident.
Now IndiGo is aiming to increase its international capacity to 40% this year, says CEO Peter Elbers. Now speaking to Shireen Bhan, Elbers welcomed a grievance redressal body for customers on airfares, but he also called for correlation between the cost of doing business and airfares. Now, the IndiGo CEO also warned about the rising airport fee, saying it runs the risk of tipping over. Take a look.
The IndiGo international network chain started some years back, very traditional if you wish, between India and the Gulf and the Middle East countries. We've been slowly, slowly expanding that. So in '23 we started flights into Central Asia, we started flights into Nairobi. We had moved, and I had a meeting earlier this week with the CEO of Changi Airport, we moved from moving into Singapore from three Indian cities to nine today. So, but that's still within that 5 to 6 hour radius. I think the next step for IndiGo is to make sure that even Europe and further parts of Asia would be accessible directly operated by IndiGo. And, you know, if India is going to be the third largest economy in the world by '27, the country needs and deserves actually an airline of the size and scale and potential of the nation.
We've once again seen the parliamentary panel recommend the possibility of looking at intervening in the market as far as prices are concerned. We've now got the government setting up a special cell where customers can actually talk about their complaints as far as pricing is concerned. Would you worry about the possibility of government intervention on pricing at this point in time when there's a body where customers can complain about certain things?
I think that's a good thing. There's always good for companies to have a body which keeps sort of things in balance. So I think in general to have a body like that is a good thing. Having said that, looking at the Indian market, it's one of the most, if not the most, competitive market in the world. The average price levels are extremely competitive. There has been some recent reports which made a comparison how did inflation go over the years and how did airfares go, and actually you could see that the inflation has gone much, much faster than the airfare. So we need to catch up in that, in efficiency and sort of in order to keep the margins, because in the long run there must be a correlation between the cost of doing business and the price of airfares, right? Otherwise you'll be out of business. Looking at the price sensitivity, a few hundred of rupees sometimes is enough to have people flying or not flying.
So we should be mindful of looking how these user fees will eventually find their way into ticket prices because at the end of the day there's a correlation between what is the cost price of a product and what is the price for the consumer eventually. So full support for all the changes, I think it's important that it's being done, but we should be mindful that at the end of the day the price of the ticket is based on different elements and this aspect is an important part of that and that should be in line with it.
Is it in line with what you believe is the kind of threshold or do you believe it's tipped over?
I think at some points it runs the risk of tipping over. You know, if you take the price of a ticket, the price of some of the UDF should, in terms of percentage and correlation, should not be too much as a total price of the ticket, right? There's going to be fuel and flying and this and that and the other. So I think again, full support for all the changes we're making, but we should be mindful of what would it do eventually for the total ticket prices.
All right. Now OpenAI has launched new AI reasoning models o3 and o4 mini, products which are developer focused with an improvement in coding abilities. Now ChatGPT is also gaining immense traction in India with users tripling in 2024 to become OpenAI's second largest global market. Now as part of our global dialogue series, CNBC TV18's Shireen Bhan spoke with Kevin Weil, the Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, to discuss their plans for the Indian market and the Ghibli image generation tool which has gone viral in the country. Take a look.
Let me start by asking you, Kevin, to give us a snapshot in very simple language. What does ChatGPT 4.1 mean for OpenAI and for consumers, and how do o3 and o4 mini change the game?
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here with you. India is an incredibly important market for OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's our second largest market, it's our fastest growing market, and it's also the market where we saw our image generation just take off. But we had some great launches this week. You mentioned GPT 4.1, which was a model for developers that is fantastic at coding and complex instruction following. And so, you know, that was a model that we released focused on developers, and we're seeing them, you know, we have over 3 million developers on the OpenAI platform and they're doing amazing things. That is one of our fastest growing models by usage ever. And then just this morning in the US we launched o3 and o4 mini, which are our frontier reasoning models. They're the smartest, fastest, safest models that we have ever launched. They're incredible at things like computer programming. So if you look at measures like on competitive coding benchmarks, these models would be better at competitive coding than all but about 200 people in the world. And they can answer hard PhD level science questions better than 80% of PhDs in their field across all fields simultaneously. So they're really very intelligent models. But you can also use them for more mundane tasks, understanding medical jargon or looking at what's happening in the world, creating images, helping you with writing, translating languages. You know, these models are so dynamic and we're super excited to see what people can do with them.
Let's talk about what you're seeing in India. You talked about how it is today your fastest growing market for ChatGPT. How many active users do you have in India? What surprised you about the adoption, the rate of adoption, the pace of adoption in India? Why do you believe you've seen this kind of an uptick here?
Yeah, I mean, our active users in India tripled, more than tripled in 2024. So it's been incredible to watch. A few weeks ago we launched a new image generation tool using AI to generate incredibly, you know, images that you can control to a great degree, whether you want them to be vivid and lifelike or cartoony or following a particular style. We saw, you know, Prime Minister Modi tweeted using our image gen feature. We had cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar tweet images from ChatGPT and it just took off. I mean, unlike anything I've ever seen. I've been fortunate to be at Twitter for many years, I led product at Instagram for a number of years. I mean, these companies were growing very quickly. I have never seen anything grow like ChatGPT was growing because people were having so much fun creating these images, sharing them with their friends on WhatsApp and in other places. And it's just incredible to see. So we marshaled a whole lot of resources, we really tried to support it, especially in India. We released new features around our image gen like image galleries that let you quickly view all of the images that you've created. There's just a huge amount of excitement in India for ChatGPT and not just for this image gen feature, but also, you know, ChatGPT speaks 100 languages, it can teach you any subject you want to learn, it can save you time at home and at work. And so, you know, it's just so broadly useful and it's completely free. You don't have to pay us a dime. You can use it on an Android phone for free. So it's just, you know, we deeply believe in bringing AI to the world and the positive impacts that that can make. And I can't think of a better example than what's happening in India right now with ChatGPT.
All right, on that note we're going to wrap up this special edition of Earning Central. More news and updates will continue right here on CNBC TV18. For now, it's goodbye. Thank you for watching.
Fourth quarter numbers beat street estimates with profits up about 6.7% and net interest income up 10.3% over the previous year. Asset quality improved while the net interest margins on total assets came in at a seven quarter high. Abhishek is joining in with the numbers.
Well, HDFC Bank reported its Q4 FY25 numbers. The numbers were strong, especially on the core operating profit growth which was up more than 20% year-on-year and about 4.9% on a sequential basis. So take a look at the net interest margin on total assets. It's at a seven quarter high of about 3.54% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Now this has a one-off of about 7 to 8 basis points with respect to net interest margin. So even then it comes down to 3.46% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Analysts were estimating a decline in net interest margin. However, they have expanded without including even the one-off income over there. Take a look at the cost to income ratio. It's at a four quarter low of 39.8% versus 40.6% in the previous quarter. The annualized quarterly slippage ratio is at a five quarter low coming in at 1.15% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. Overall the slippages have declined nearly 15% on a quarter-on-quarter basis which is heartening to see. Their asset quality remains impeccable and continues to improve with one of the best in the industry. A gross NPA ratio is at 1.3% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. The net NPA ratio has also declined by three basis points on a sequential basis. The other key highlights being the net interest income growth is about 10.3% year-on-year and about 4.6% sequentially. They have been able to command better because the loan growth is at just 5.5% year-on-year and about 4% sequentially. The OPEX has remained under control for them which has helped the operating profit growth. OPEX have declined by 2.3% year-on-year and grown by only 2.6% quarter-on-quarter. Overall the provisions are down 76.5% year-on-year but they have increased by just 1.2% sequentially. So PAT is a growth of 6.7% year-on-year and about 5.3% quarter-on-quarter overall. Good sense, good numbers coming in from HDFC Bank especially on the core operating profit growth. Back to you.
Well, the other big lender, ICICI Bank, reported a mixed set of numbers with business momentum slowing down while profitability was above street estimates. Abhishek, tell us more on that front.
Mixed set of numbers coming in from ICICI Bank. Weak with respect to business momentum that you are seeing for them while the P&L continues to remain strong for them. Take a look at the deposit growth, 14% year-on-year and about 5.9% sequentially. Year-on-year it's the weakest deposit growth that you are seeing in last eight quarters. Now advances growth is at 13.3% year-on-year and just 2.1% quarter-on-quarter. So year-on-year this 13.3% growth is the weakest that you are seeing in last 17 quarters and sequentially it's one of the weakest loan growth that you are seeing in last 15 quarters. So loan growth remains very weak for them compared to their historical numbers. The net interest margin is at a five quarter high of 4.41% versus 4.25%. The core operating profit growth is at a five quarter high of 13.7% year-on-year and 5.5% sequentially. The quarterly annualized slippage ratio, that's heartening to see, it's a 17 quarter low of 1.5% versus 1.85% in the previous quarter. Their asset quality continues to improve and remains one of the best that you are seeing in last 10 years or even more. Gross NPA ratio down to 1.67% versus 1.96% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio down to 0.39% versus 0.42% in the previous quarter. So asset quality and P&L gets a thumbs up while weak business momentum of weak loan growth actually impacts the balance sheet. Back to you.
All right. And finally, Yes Bank also reported its fourth quarter numbers where net profits saw a 63% rise on a year-on-year basis. Take us through the details, Abhishek.
Well, control over cost of funds has actually held the net interest margin and the P&L of Yes Bank in this quarter. So take a look at the P&L versus Apollo. The NII has a beat of 4.3% while the PAT beat is about 23.5%. Net interest margin is at an eight quarter high of 2.5%. The loan growth is very weak, one of the weakest that you are seeing in last seven quarters, just 8.1% year-on-year and about 0.55% sequentially. The securities receipts are now nil, so basically they are now zero. Other income has also aided the topline growth for them. So other income is up 15% quarter-on-quarter as fee income is up 21.5% on a sequential basis. So overall the loan growth was weak but they made up in the fees. Fee income was very strong for them. So cost to income ratio hence is at the lowest in last 15 quarters coming in at 67.3% versus 71.1% in the previous quarter as OPEX has declined by more than 4% year-on-year. Annualized slippage ratio is at a 10 quarter low coming in at less than 2%, 1.99% versus 2.2% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio is one of the lowest that you are seeing in last 8 years or even more. Net NPA ratio is now down to 0.3% versus 0.5% in the previous quarter. A quarterly annualized credit cost is at a four quarter high of 1.48% versus 1.26% in the previous quarter. Looks like there might have been a bit of write-off which caused provisioning this time around. Return ratios, they are one of the best for the bank in last 25 quarters but one of the weakest when you see with respect to peers, underperforming because return ratios continues to remain tepid when compared to peers but one of the best in 25 quarters. RoA at 7% versus 6% in the previous quarter. RoE at 6.2% when compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter.
Thanks very much. Let's cut across to HDFC Bank's earnings concall being addressed by their CFO, Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
Driven by favorable monsoon and increased Rabi sowing, well for strong agricultural performance. This would be further supported by gradually improving manufacturing sector and steady service sector output. As we look forward for FY26, we expect GDP growth to sustain, supported by pickup in rural discretionary consumer demand, investment activity and multiplier effect of the income tax reduction and RBI repo cut boost to aggregate demand along with providing durable liquidity to the system. We acknowledge that the global macro environment outlook has become more uncertain due to the recent tariff related measures and volatility surrounding them. This may potentially impact global inflation leading to lower growth across economies. As we see it, corporates have adopted a wait and watch stance as we're waiting for more clarity. We remain watchful in this area.
Getting to the deposits. Robust deposit franchise powered by vast distribution strength and strong 97 million customer relationships has grown our deposits to 27.1 trillion. 1.5 trillion growth in the quarter, 5.9% or 3.3 trillion in 12 months period last year, growing at a rate of 14.1%. On an average basis on the deposits, we have seen growth of 15.8% year-on-year. Savings deposits also grew by 249 billion or 4.1% sequentially. Overall CASA deposits ended the quarter at 9.4 trillion, growth of 0.7 trillion in the quarter, resulting in CASA ratio of 34.8% compared to 34% in December. Term deposits aggregating to rupees 17.7 trillion as of March end, 0.8 trillion or 4.7% during the quarter and 3 trillion rupees or 20.3% year-on-year. On the branch network, we added 312 branches during the quarter and 717 branches over the past 12 months. We added 1.8 million new liability relationships. We worked on rebalancing the funding profile with better mix of deposits and lowering borrowing resulting in a CD ratio of 96.5% coming down from 104.4% in prior year. Borrowing mix is now at 14% of total liabilities versus 18% at the end of prior year.
In terms of loans, assets advances under management as of March end at 27.7 trillion grew by 0.9 trillion or 3.3% during the quarter and 2 trillion rupees over the prior year, on an average AUM growth of 7.3% year-over-year. Getting to capital strength, our capital adequacy ratio is 19.6% with the CET1 at 17.2% and balance sheet remains resilient with an average LCR of about 119%.
Strong revenues with a resilient NIM. Revenues were at 441 billion for the quarter and for the year at 1,683 billion. Net interest margin remained in a rangebound and grew by 10% over prior year at 321 billion. The margin on a reported basis was 3.54% and on a core basis 3.46%. On an interest earning asset basis, the reported margin was at 3.73%. Now getting to operating expenses, for the quarter operating expenses at 176 billion, up by 2.6% over prior quarter. Expenses remained best-in-class at 1.9% of total assets and cost to income was at 39.8%.
Getting to credit, asset quality is a key strength and a differentiator and it remains pristine. The GNP ratio was at 1.33% as compared to 1.42% in prior quarter. GNPA ratio excluding NPAs in agricultural segment was 1.13% prior quarter 1.19%. Now getting to the total provisions were at about 32 billion and for the quarter prior quarter was also at about 32 billion. The total provisions coverage was at 68%. Total provisions coverage excluding agriculture was at 71%. Stock of provisions, contingent and floating provisions were approximately rupees 259 billion, contingent at 135 billion and floating provisions at 124 billion. General provisions were 109 billion. Total provisions comprising specific, floating, contingent and general were about 172% of gross non-performing loans. This is in addition to securities held as collateral in several of the cases. The annualized credit cost ratio for the quarter was at 48 basis points. Prior quarter was at 50 basis points. Net profit after tax for the quarter was 176 billion and net profit after tax for the full year was 673 billion and grew by 10.7% over prior year.
Now getting to the closing, as liquidity and economic growth improves, we are well placed to grow both in deposits and loans. Deposits as I mentioned grew 15.8% over prior year and loans momentum as seen in the sequential growth was at 3.3% sequential growth which works to about the annualized rate of about 12 to 13%. This delivers a return on assets in the quarter about 1.94% and return on equity of about 14.4%. The earnings per share in the quarter, quarterly earnings per share 23 rupees at the bank standalone level and 24.6 rupees at consolidated bank level. The book value per share on a standalone bank is rupees 655 and at the consolidated bank is at about rupees 681.9. I do want to point out to the dividend that has been, dividends, board of directors recommended a dividend of rupees 22 per equity share of rupees 1 for the year ended March 31, 2025. This will be subject to the approval of shareholders at the ensuing annual general meeting. Thank you. Thanks to our employees for the remarkable performance. With that may I request the operator to open up the line for questions.
All right. That was the HDFC Bank CFO on the bank's fourth quarter numbers that beat estimates on both the top line and the bottom line. On that note we're going to have to slip into a short break but don't go anywhere. We're back in just a moment with more news and updates.
Welcome back. Now onto some more earnings. Infosys missed estimates in the fourth quarter. Dollar revenue growth contracted by 4% forcing the company to miss its full year growth guidance. The IT major is also expecting growth to remain subdued in the entire financial year. Remma Tendulkar is here with the fine print of the Infosys numbers.
Remma, thanks so much for that. So let me give you the key points from Infy's numbers. One, for the March quarter, a big revenue miss. The company's topline has declined by 3.5% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, lower than street expectations. The good part is the company is giving us a guidance. They are saying in FY26 revenue growth will be 0 to 3%, slightly lower than the 1 to 4% that the street analysts were hoping for. But you know, the environment is uncertain but the management did say that at the lower end of the guidance, which is 0%, they are baking in some deterioration in the macro. At the upper end, that's 3%, they're assuming the macros remain stable or slight improvement. Margin guidance remains unchanged at 20 to 22%. But back to Q4 now. Q4 was very weak for the company at least in terms of the top line at minus 3.5% revenue growth. It's also lower than peers and because of that the company has missed achieving its FY25 guidance. They end FY25 with a topline growth of 4.2%, lower than the 4.5 to 5% that they guided for. That said, their margin defense has been strong. The company's EBIT margins were at 21%, very modest decline on a sequential basis but considering the negative topline growth, it's a strong performance on the margin front. Deals too have inched up by 4-5% on a sequential basis at $2.6 billion. So on the whole, it's a muted Q4. The guidance is slightly lower than street expectations but the guidance shouldn't come as a surprise based on the commentary that we've heard from the management and the street will take comfort from the deal wins and even the margin performance.
All right, Remma, we leave it at that. Thanks very much for joining in. Now while addressing the media earlier, the Infosys CEO and MD Salil Parekh commented on deal wins made by the company and how that is expected to roll out despite the looming uncertainty. Take a look.
In terms of mega deals, we had two mega deals in the last financial year. We have a pipeline of mega deals today. What is sort of what we saw in the past when things of this nature happen, which is changes in the environment, there's also an interest with clients on cost takeout, automation and efficiency and consolidation. We will see how it plays out because it's only a few days as clients have looked at it but we have seen large deals moving in which we have closed moving into the next phases as was evident.
Now IndiGo is aiming to increase its international capacity to 40% this year, says CEO Peter Elbers. Now speaking to Shireen Bhan, Elbers welcomed a grievance redressal body for customers on airfares but he also called for correlation between the cost of doing business and airfares. Now the IndiGo CEO also warned about the rising airport fee saying it runs the risk of tipping over. Take a look.
The IndiGo international network chain started some years back, very traditional if you wish, between India and the Gulf and the Middle East countries. We've been slowly expanding that. So in '23 we started flights into Central Asia, we started flights into Nairobi. We have moved, and I had a meeting earlier this week with the CEO of Changi Airport, we moved from moving into Singapore from three Indian cities to nine today. So but that's still within that 5 to 6 hour radius. I think the next step for IndiGo is to make sure that even Europe and further parts of Asia would be accessible directly operated by IndiGo. And you know, if India is going to be the third largest economy in the world by '27, the country needs and deserves actually an airline of the size and scale and potential of the nation.
We once again seen the parliamentary panel recommend the possibility of looking at intervening in the market as far as prices are concerned. We've now got the government setting up a special cell where customers can actually talk about their complaints as far as pricing is concerned. Would you worry about the possibility of government intervention on pricing at this point in time?
Well, when there's a body where customers can complain about certain things, I think that's a good thing. There's always good for companies to have a body which keeps sort of things in balance and things. So I think in general to have a body like that is a good thing. Having said that, looking at the Indian market, it's one of the most, if not the most, competitive market in the world. The average price levels are extremely competitive. There has been some recent reports which made a comparison how did inflation go over the years and how did airfares go, and actually you could see that the inflation has gone much, much faster than the airfare. So we need to catch up in that in efficiency and sort of in order to keep the margins because in the long run there must be a correlation between the cost of doing business and the price of airfares, right? Otherwise you'll be out of business. Looking at the price sensitivity, a few hundred of rupees sometimes is enough to have people flying or not flying. So we should be mindful of looking how these user fees will eventually find their way into ticket prices because at the end of the day there's a correlation between what is the cost price of a product and what is the price for the consumer eventually. So full support for all the changes, I think it's important that it's being done, but we should be mindful that at the end of the day the price of the ticket is based on different elements and this aspect is an important part of that and that should be in line with it.
Is it in line with what you believe is the kind of threshold or do you believe it's tipped over?
I think at some points it runs the risk of tipping over. You know, if you take the price of a ticket, the price of some of the UDF should, in terms of percentage and correlation, should not be too much as a total price of the ticket, right? There's going to be fuel and flying and this and that and the other. So I think again, full support for all the changes we're making, but we should be mindful of what would it do eventually for the total ticket prices.
All right. Right now OpenAI has launched new AI reasoning models o3 and o4 mini, products which are developer focused with an improvement in coding abilities. Now ChatGPT is also gaining immense traction in India with users tripling in 2024 to become OpenAI's second largest global market. Now as part of our global dialogue series, CNBC TV18's Shireen Bhan spoke with Kevin Weil, the Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, to discuss their plans for the Indian market and the Ghibli image generation tool which has gone viral in the country. Take a look.
Let me start by asking you, Kevin, to give us a snapshot in very simple language. What does ChatGPT 4.1 mean for OpenAI and for consumers, and how do o3 and o4 mini change the game?
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here with you. India is an incredibly important market for OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's our second largest market, it's our fastest growing market, and it's also the market where we saw our image generation just take off. But we had some great launches this week. You mentioned GPT 4.1, which was a model for developers that is fantastic at coding and complex instruction following. And so, you know, that was a model that we released focused on developers, and we're seeing them, you know, we have over 3 million developers on the OpenAI platform and they're doing amazing things. That is one of our fastest growing models by usage ever. And then just this morning in the US we launched o3 and o4 mini, which are our frontier reasoning models. They're the smartest, fastest, safest models that we have ever launched. They're incredible at things like computer programming. So if you look at measures like on competitive coding benchmarks, these models would be better at competitive coding than all but about 200 people in the world. And they can answer hard PhD level science questions better than 80% of PhDs in their field across all fields simultaneously. So they're really very intelligent models. But you can also use them for more mundane tasks, understanding medical jargon or looking at what's happening in the world, creating images, helping you with writing, translating languages. You know, these models are so dynamic and we're super excited to see what people can do with them.
Let's talk about what you're seeing in India. You talked about how it is today your fastest growing market for ChatGPT. How many active users do you have in India? What surprised you about the adoption, the rate of adoption, the pace of adoption in India? Why do you believe you've seen this kind of an uptick here?
Yeah, I mean, our active users in India tripled, more than tripled in 2024. So it's been incredible to watch. A few weeks ago we launched a new image generation tool using AI to generate incredibly, you know, images that you can control to a great degree, whether you want them to be vivid and lifelike or cartoony or following a particular style. We saw, you know, Prime Minister Modi tweeted using our image gen feature. We had cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar tweet images from ChatGPT and it just took off. I mean, unlike anything I've ever seen. I've been fortunate to be at Twitter for many years, I led product at Instagram for a number of years. I mean, these companies were growing very quickly. I have never seen anything grow like ChatGPT was growing because people were having so much fun creating these images, sharing them with their friends on WhatsApp and in other places. And it's just incredible to see. So we marshaled a whole lot of resources, we really tried to support it, especially in India. We released new features around our image gen like image galleries that let you quickly view all of the images that you've created. There's just a huge amount of excitement in India for ChatGPT and not just for this image gen feature, but also, you know, ChatGPT speaks 100 languages, it can teach you any subject you want to learn, it can save you time at home and at work. And so, you know, it's just so broadly useful and it's completely free. You don't have to pay us a dime. You can use it on an Android phone for free. So it's just, you know, we deeply believe in bringing AI to the world and the positive impacts that that can make. And I can't think of a better example than what's happening in India right now with ChatGPT.
All right, on that note we're going to wrap up this special edition of Earning Central. More news and updates will continue right here on CNBC TV18. For now, it's goodbye. Thank you for watching.
Fourth quarter numbers beat street estimates with profits up about 6.7% and net interest income up 10.3% over the previous year. Asset quality improved while the net interest margins on total assets came in at a seven quarter high. Abhishek Kotari is joining in with the numbers.
Well, HDFC Bank reported its Q4 FY25 numbers. The numbers were strong, especially on the core operating profit growth which was up more than 20% year-on-year and about 4.9% on a sequential basis. So take a look at the net interest margin on total assets. It's at a seven quarter high of about 3.54% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Now this has a one-off of about 7 to 8 basis points with respect to net interest margin. So even then it comes down to 3.46% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Analysts were estimating a decline in net interest margin. However, they have expanded without including even the one-off income over there. Take a look at the cost to income ratio. It's at a four quarter low of 39.8% versus 40.6% in the previous quarter. The annualized quarterly slippage ratio is at a five quarter low coming in at 1.15% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. Overall the slippages have declined nearly 15% on a quarter-on-quarter basis which is heartening to see. Their asset quality remains impeccable and continues to improve with one of the best in the industry. A gross NPA ratio is at 1.3% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. The net NPA ratio has also declined by three basis points on a sequential basis. The other key highlights being the net interest income growth is about 10.3% year-on-year and about 4.6% sequentially. They have been able to command better because the loan growth is at just 5.5% year-on-year and about 4% sequentially. The OPEX has remained under control for them which has helped the operating profit growth. OPEX have declined by 2.3% year-on-year and grown by only 2.6% quarter-on-quarter. Overall the provisions are down 76.5% year-on-year but they have increased by just 1.2% sequentially. So PAT is a growth of 6.7% year-on-year and about 5.3% quarter-on-quarter overall. Good sense, good numbers coming in from HDFC Bank especially on the core operating profit growth. Back to you.
Well, the other big lender, ICICI Bank, reported a mixed set of numbers with business momentum slowing down while profitability was above street estimates. Abhishek, tell us more on that front.
Mixed set of numbers coming in from ICICI Bank. Weak with respect to business momentum that you are seeing for them while the P&L continues to remain strong for them. Take a look at the deposit growth, 14% year-on-year and about 5.9% sequentially. Year-on-year it's the weakest deposit growth that you are seeing in last eight quarters. Now advances growth is at 13.3% year-on-year and just 2.1% quarter-on-quarter. So year-on-year this 13.3% growth is the weakest that you are seeing in last 17 quarters and sequentially it's one of the weakest loan growth that you are seeing in last 15 quarters. So loan growth remains very weak for them compared to their historical numbers. The net interest margin is at a five quarter high of 4.41% versus 4.25%. The core operating profit growth is at a five quarter high of 13.7% year-on-year and 5.5% sequentially. The quarterly annualized slippage ratio, that's heartening to see, it's a 17 quarter low of 1.5% versus 1.85% in the previous quarter. Their asset quality continues to improve and remains one of the best that you are seeing in last 10 years or even more. Gross NPA ratio down to 1.67% versus 1.96% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio down to 0.39% versus 0.42% in the previous quarter. So asset quality and P&L gets a thumbs up while weak business momentum of weak loan growth actually impacts the balance sheet. Back to you.
All right. And finally, Yes Bank also reported its fourth quarter numbers where net profits saw a 63% rise on a year-on-year basis. Take us through the details, Abhishek.
Well, control over cost of funds has actually held the net interest margin and the P&L of Yes Bank in this quarter. So take a look at the P&L versus Apollo. The NII has a beat of 4.3% while the PAT beat is about 23.5%. Net interest margin is at an eight quarter high of 2.5%. The loan growth is very weak, one of the weakest that you are seeing in last seven quarters, just 8.1% year-on-year and about 0.55% sequentially. The securities receipts are now nil, so basically they are now zero. Other income has also aided the topline growth for them. So other income is up 15% quarter-on-quarter as fee income is up 21.5% on a sequential basis. So overall the loan growth was weak but they made up in the fees. Fee income was very strong for them. So cost to income ratio hence is at the lowest in last 15 quarters coming in at 67.3% versus 71.1% in the previous quarter as OPEX has declined by more than 4% year-on-year. Annualized slippage ratio is at a 10 quarter low coming in at less than 2%, 1.99% versus 2.2% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio is one of the lowest that you are seeing in last 8 years or even more. Net NPA ratio is now down to 0.3% versus 0.5% in the previous quarter. A quarterly annualized credit cost is at a four quarter high of 1.48% versus 1.26% in the previous quarter. Looks like there might have been a bit of write-off which caused provisioning this time around. Return ratios, they are one of the best for the bank in last 25 quarters but one of the weakest when you see with respect to peers, underperforming because return ratios continues to remain tepid when compared to peers but one of the best in 25 quarters. RoA at 7% versus 6% in the previous quarter. RoE at 6.2% when compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter.
Thanks very much. Let's cut across to HDFC Bank's earnings concall being addressed by their CFO, Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
Driven by favorable monsoon and increased Rabi sowing, well for strong agricultural performance. This would be further supported by gradually improving manufacturing sector and steady service sector output. As we look forward for FY26, we expect GDP growth to sustain, supported by pickup in rural spending, discretionary consumer demand, investment activity and multiplier effect of the income tax reduction and RBI repo cut boost to aggregate demand along with providing durable liquidity to the system. We acknowledge that the global macro environment outlook has become more uncertain due to the recent tariff related measures and volatility surrounding them. This may potentially impact global inflation leading to lower growth across economies. As we see it, corporates have adopted a wait and watch stance as we're waiting for more clarity. We remain watchful in this area.
Getting to the deposits. Robust deposit franchise powered by vast distribution strength and strong 97 million customer relationships has grown our deposits to 27.1 trillion. 1.5 trillion growth in the quarter, 5.9% or 3.3 trillion in 12 months period last year, growing at a rate of 14.1%. On an average basis on the deposits, we have seen growth of 15.8% year-on-year. Savings deposits also grew by 249 billion or 4.1% sequentially. Overall CASA deposits ended the quarter at 9.4 trillion, growth of 0.7 trillion in the quarter, resulting in CASA ratio of 34.8% compared to 34% in December. Term deposits aggregating to rupees 17.7 trillion as of March end, 0.8 trillion or 4.7% during the quarter and 3 trillion rupees or 20.3% year-on-year. On the branch network, we added 312 branches during the quarter and 717 branches over the past 12 months. We added 1.8 million new liability relationships. We worked on rebalancing the funding profile with better mix of deposits and lowering borrowing resulting in a CD ratio of 96.5% coming down from 104.4% in prior year. Borrowing mix is now at 14% of total liabilities versus 18% at the end of prior year.
In terms of loans, assets advances under management as of March end at 27.7 trillion grew by 0.9 trillion or 3.3% during the quarter and 2 trillion rupees over the prior year, on an average AUM growth of 7.3% year-over-year. Getting to capital strength, our capital adequacy ratio is 19.6% with the CET1 at 17.2% and balance sheet remains resilient with an average LCR of about 119%.
Strong revenues with a resilient NIM. Revenues were at 441 billion for the quarter and for the year at 1,683 billion. Net interest margin remained in a rangebound and grew by 10% over prior year at 321 billion. The margin on a reported basis was 3.54% and on a core basis 3.46%. On an interest earning asset basis, the reported margin was at 3.73%. Now getting to operating expenses, for the quarter operating expenses at 176 billion, up by 2.6% over prior quarter. Expenses remained best-in-class at 1.9% of total assets and cost to income was at 39.8%.
Getting to credit, asset quality is a key strength and a differentiator and it remains pristine. The GNP ratio was at 1.33% as compared to 1.42% in prior quarter. GNPA ratio excluding NPAs in agricultural segment was 1.13% prior quarter 1.19%. Now getting to the total provisions were at about 32 billion and for the quarter prior quarter was also at about 32 billion. The total provisions coverage was at 68%. Total provisions coverage excluding agriculture was at 71%. Stock of provisions, contingent and floating provisions were approximately rupees 259 billion, contingent at 135 billion and floating provisions at 124 billion. General provisions were 109 billion. Total provisions comprising specific, floating, contingent and general were about 172% of gross non-performing loans. This is in addition to securities held as collateral in several of the cases. The annualized credit cost ratio for the quarter was at 48 basis points. Prior quarter was at 50 basis points. Net profit after tax for the quarter was 176 billion and net profit after tax for the full year was 673 billion and grew by 10.7% over prior year.
Now getting to the closing, as liquidity and economic growth improves, we are well placed to grow both in deposits and loans. Deposits as I mentioned grew 15.8% over prior year and loans momentum as seen in the sequential growth was at 3.3% sequential growth which works to about the annualized rate of about 12 to 13%. This delivers a return on assets in the quarter about 1.94% and return on equity of about 14.4%. The earnings per share in the quarter, quarterly earnings per share 23 rupees at the bank standalone level and 24.6 rupees at consolidated bank level. The book value per share on a standalone bank is rupees 655 and at the consolidated bank is at about rupees 681.9. I do want to point out to the dividend that has been, dividends, board of directors recommended a dividend of rupees 22 per equity share of rupees 1 for the year ended March 31, 2025. This will be subject to the approval of shareholders at the ensuing annual general meeting. Thank you. Thanks to our employees for the remarkable performance. With that may I request the operator to open up the line for questions.
All right. That was the HDFC Bank CFO on the bank's fourth quarter numbers that beat estimates on both the top line and the bottom line. On that note we're going to have to slip into a short break but don't go anywhere. We're back in just a moment with more news and updates.
Welcome back. Now onto some more earnings. Infosys missed estimates in the fourth quarter. Dollar revenue growth contracted by 4% forcing the company to miss its full year growth guidance. The IT major is also expecting growth to remain subdued in the entire financial year. Remma Tendulkar is here with the fine print of the Infosys numbers.
Remma, thanks so much for that. So let me give you the key points from Infy's numbers. One, for the March quarter, a big revenue miss. The company's topline has declined by 3.5% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, lower than street expectations. The good part is the company is giving us a guidance. They are saying in FY26 revenue growth will be 0 to 3%, slightly lower than the 1 to 4% that the street analysts were hoping for. But you know, the environment is uncertain. What the management did say that at the lower end of the guidance, which is 0%, they are baking in some deterioration in the macro. At the upper end, that's 3%, they're assuming the macros remain stable or slight improvement. Margin guidance remains unchanged at 20 to 22%. But back to Q4 now. Q4 was very weak for the company at least in terms of the top line at minus 3.5% revenue growth. It's also lower than peers and because of that the company has missed achieving its FY25 guidance. They end FY25 with a topline growth of 4.2%, lower than the 4.5 to 5% that they guided for. That said, their margin defense has been strong. The company's EBIT margins were at 21%, very modest decline on a sequential basis but considering the negative topline growth, it's a strong performance on the margin front. Deals too have inched up by 4-5% on a sequential basis at $2.6 billion. So on the whole, it's a muted Q4. The guidance is slightly lower than street expectations but the guidance shouldn't come as a surprise based on the commentary that we've heard from the management and the street will take comfort from the deal wins and even the margin performance.
All right, Remma, we leave it at that. Thanks very much for joining in. Now while addressing the media earlier, the Infosys CEO and MD Salil Parekh commented on deal wins made by the company and how that is expected to roll out despite the looming uncertainty. Take a look.
In terms of mega deals, we had two mega deals in the last financial year. We have a pipeline of mega deals today. What is sort of what we saw in the past when things of this nature happen, which is changes in the environment, there's also an interest with clients on cost takeout, automation and efficiency and consolidation. We will see how it plays out because it's only a few days as clients have looked at it but we have seen large deals moving in which we have closed moving into the next phases as was evident.
Now IndiGo is aiming to increase its international capacity to 40% this year, says CEO Peter Elbers. Now speaking to Shireen Bhan, Elbers welcomed a grievance redressal body for customers on airfares but he also called for correlation between the cost of doing business and airfares. Now the IndiGo CEO also warned about the rising airport fee saying it runs the risk of tipping over. Take a look.
The IndiGo international network chain started some years back, very traditional if you wish, between India and the Gulf and the Middle East countries. We've been slowly expanding that. So in '23 we started flights into Central Asia, we started flights into Nairobi. We have moved, and I had a meeting earlier this week with the CEO of Changi Airport, we moved from moving into Singapore from three Indian cities to nine today. So but that's still within that 5 to 6 hour radius. I think the next step for IndiGo is to make sure that even Europe and further parts of Asia would be accessible directly operated by IndiGo. And you know, if India is going to be the third largest economy in the world by '27, the country needs and deserves actually an airline of the size and scale and potential of the nation.
An airline of the size and scale and potential of the nation. We once again seen the parliamentary panel recommend the possibility of looking at intervening in the market as far as prices are concerned. We've now got the government setting up a special cell where customers can actually talk about their complaints as far as pricing is concerned. Would you worry about the possibility of government intervention on pricing at this point in time when there's a body where customers can complain about certain things?
I think that's a good thing. There's always good for companies to have a body which keeps sort of things in balance. So I think in general to have a body like that is a good thing. Having said that, looking at the Indian market, it's one of the most, if not the most, competitive market in the world. The average price levels are extremely competitive. There has been some recent reports which made a comparison how did inflation go over the years and how did airfares go, and actually you could see that the inflation has gone much, much faster than the airfare. We need to catch up in that in efficiency and sort of in order to keep the margins because in the long run there must be a correlation between the cost of doing business and the price of airfares, right? Otherwise you'll be out of business. Looking at the price sensitivity, a few hundred of rupees sometimes is enough to have people flying or not flying. So we should be mindful of looking how these user fees will eventually find their way into ticket prices because again at the end of the day there's a correlation between what is the cost price of a product and what is the price for the consumer eventually. So full support for all the changes. I think it's important that it's being done, but we should be mindful that at the end of the day the price of the ticket is based on different elements and this aspect is an important part of that and that should be in line with it.
Is it in line with what you believe is the kind of threshold or do you believe it's tipped over?
I think at some points it runs the risk of tipping over. You know, if you take the price of a ticket, the price of some of the UDF should, in terms of percentage and correlation, should be not too much as a total price of the ticket, right? There's going to be fuel and flying and this and that and the other. So I think again, full support for all the changes we're making, but we should be mindful of what would it do eventually for the total ticket prices.
All right. Now OpenAI has launched new AI reasoning models o3 and o4 mini, products which are developer focused with an improvement in coding abilities. Now ChatGPT is also gaining immense traction in India with users tripling in 2024 to become OpenAI's second largest global market. Now as part of our global dialogue series, CNBC TV18's Shireen Bhan spoke with Kevin Weil, the chief product officer at OpenAI, to discuss their plans for the Indian market and the Ghibli image generation tool which has gone viral in the country. Take a look.
Let me start by asking you, Kevin, to give us a snapshot in very simple language. What does ChatGPT 4.1 mean for OpenAI and for consumers, and how do o3 and o4 mini change the game?
Yeah, well first of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here with you. India is an incredibly important market for OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's our second largest market. It's our fastest growing market, and it's also the market where we saw our image generation just take off. But we had some great launches this week. You mentioned GPT-4.1, which was a model for developers that is fantastic at coding and complex instruction following. And so, you know, that was a model that we released focused on developers, and we're seeing them, you know, we have over three million developers on the OpenAI platform and they're doing amazing things. That is one of our fastest growing models by usage ever. And then just this morning in the US we launched o3 and o4 mini, which are our frontier reasoning models. They're the smartest, fastest, safest models that we have ever launched. They're incredible at things like computer programming. So if you look at measures like on competitive coding benchmarks, these models would be better at competitive coding than all but about 200 people in the world. And they can answer hard PhD-level science questions better than 80% of PhDs in their field across all fields simultaneously. So they're really very intelligent models, but you can also use them for more mundane tasks: understanding medical jargon or looking at what's happening in the world, creating images, helping you with writing, translating languages. You know, these models are so dynamic and we're super excited to see what people can do with them.
Let's talk about what you're seeing in India. You talked about how it is today your fastest growing market for ChatGPT. How many active users do you have in India? What surprised you about the adoption, the rate of adoption, the pace of adoption in India? Why do you believe you've seen this kind of an uptick here?
Yeah, I mean, our active users in India tripled, more than tripled, in 2024. So it's been incredible to watch. A few weeks ago we launched a new image generation tool using AI to generate incredibly, you know, images that you can control to a great degree, whether you want them to be vivid and lifelike or cartoony or following a particular style. We saw, you know, Prime Minister Modi tweet using our image gen feature. We had cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar tweet images from ChatGPT and it just took off. I mean, unlike anything I've ever seen. I've been fortunate to be at Twitter for many years. I led product at Instagram for a number of years. I mean, these companies were growing very quickly. I have never seen anything grow like ChatGPT was growing because people were having so much fun creating these images, sharing them with their friends on WhatsApp and in other places. And it's just incredible to see. So we marshaled a whole lot of resources. We really tried to support it, especially in India. We released new features around our image gen, like image galleries that let you quickly view all of the images that you've created. There's just a huge amount of excitement in India for ChatGPT, and not just for this image gen feature, but also, you know, ChatGPT speaks 100 languages, it can teach you any subject you want to learn, it can save you time at home and at work. And so, you know, it's just so broadly useful and it's completely free. You don't have to pay us a dime. You can use it on an Android phone for free. So it's just, you know, we deeply believe in bringing AI to the world and the positive impacts that that can make. And I can't think of a better example than what's happening in India right now with ChatGPT.
All right, on that note we're going to wrap up this special edition of Earning Central. More news and updates will continue right here on CNBC TV18. For now, it's goodbye. Thank you for watching.
Fourth quarter numbers beat street estimates with profits up about 6.7% and net interest income up 10.3% over the previous year. Asset quality improved while the net interest margins on total assets came in at a seven-quarter high. Abhishek Kotari is joining in with the numbers.
Well, HDFC Bank reported its Q4 FY25 numbers. The numbers were strong, especially on the core operating profit growth, which was up more than 20% year-on-year and about 4.9% on a sequential basis. So take a look at the net interest margin on total assets. It's at a seven-quarter high of about 3.54% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Now this has a one-off of about 7 to 8 basis points with respect to net interest margin. So even then it comes down to 3.46% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Analysts were estimating a decline in net interest margin. However, they have expanded without including even the one-off income over there. Take a look at the cost-to-income ratio. It's at a four-quarter low of 39.8% versus 40.6% in the previous quarter. The annualized quarterly slippage ratio is at a five-quarter low, coming in at 1.15% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. Overall, the slippages have declined nearly 15% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, which is heartening to see. Their asset quality remains impeccable and continues to improve, with one of the best in the industry. A gross NPA ratio is at 1.3% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. The net NPA ratio has also declined by three basis points on a sequential basis. The other key highlights being the net interest income growth is about 10.3% year-on-year and about 4.6% sequentially. They have been able to command better yield because the loan growth is at just 5.5% year-on-year and about 4% sequentially. The OPEX has remained under control for them, which has helped the operating profit growth. OPEX have declined by 2.3% year-on-year and grown by only 2.6% quarter-on-quarter. Overall, the provisions are down 76.5% year-on-year, but they have increased by just 1.2% sequentially. So PAT is a growth of 6.7% year-on-year and about 5.3% quarter-on-quarter overall. Good set of numbers coming in from HDFC Bank, especially on the core operating profit growth. Back to you.
Well, the other big lender, ICICI Bank, reported a mixed set of numbers with business momentum slowing down while profitability was above street estimates. Abhishek, tell us more on that front.
Mixed set of numbers coming in from ICICI Bank. Weak with respect to business momentum that you are seeing for them, while the P&L continues to remain strong for them. Take a look at the deposit growth: 14% year-on-year and about 5.9% sequentially. Year-on-year, it's the weakest deposit growth that you are seeing in the last eight quarters. Now advances growth is at 13.3% year-on-year and just 2.1% quarter-on-quarter. So year-on-year, this 13.3% growth is the weakest that you are seeing in the last 17 quarters, and sequentially it's one of the weakest loan growth that you are seeing in the last 15 quarters. So loan growth remains very weak for them compared to their historical numbers. The net interest margin is at a five-quarter high of 4.41% versus 4.25%. The core operating profit growth is at a five-quarter high of 13.7% year-on-year and 5.5% sequentially. The quarterly annualized slippage ratio, that's heartening to see. It's a 17-quarter low of 1.5% versus 1.85% in the previous quarter. Their asset quality continues to improve and remains one of the best that you are seeing in the last 10 years or even more. Gross NPA ratio down to 1.67% versus 1.96% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio down to 0.39% versus 0.42% in the previous quarter. So asset quality and P&L gets a thumbs up, while weak business momentum, weak loan growth, actually impacts the balance sheet. Back to you.
All right. And finally, Yes Bank also reported its fourth quarter numbers where net profits saw a 63% rise on a year-on-year basis. Take us through the details, Abhishek.
Well, control over cost of funds has actually held the net interest margin and the P&L of Yes Bank in this quarter. So take a look at the P&L versus Apollo. The NII has a beat of 4.3% while the PAT beat is about 23.5%. Net interest margin is at an eight-quarter high of 2.5%. The loan growth is very weak, one of the weakest that you are seeing in the last seven quarters, just 8.1% year-on-year and about 0.55% sequentially. The securities receipts are now nil, so basically they are now zero. Other income has also aided the topline growth for them. So other income is up 15% quarter-on-quarter as fee income is up 21.5% on a sequential basis. So overall, the loan growth was weak, but they made up in the fees. Fee income was very strong for them. So cost-to-income ratio hence is at the lowest in the last 15 quarters, coming in at 67.3% versus 71.1% in the previous quarter as OPEX has declined by more than 4% year-on-year. Annualized slippage ratio is at a 10-quarter low, coming in at less than 2%, 1.99% versus 2.2% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio is one of the lowest that you are seeing in the last eight years or even more. Net NPA ratio is now down to 0.3% versus 0.5% in the previous quarter. A quarterly annualized credit cost is at a four-quarter high of 1.48% versus 1.26% in the previous quarter. Looks like there might have been a bit of write-off which caught provisioning this time around. Return ratios, they are one of the best for the bank in the last 25 quarters, but one of the weakest when you see with respect to peers, underperforming because return ratios continue to remain tepid when compared to peers, but one of the best in 25 quarters. ROA at 7% versus 6% in the previous quarter. ROE at 6.2% when compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter.
Thanks very much. Let's cut across to HDFC Bank's earnings con-call being addressed by their CFO, Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
Driven by favorable monsoon and increased Rabi sowing, well for strong agricultural performance. This would be further supported by gradually improving manufacturing sector and steady service sector output. Getting to, as we look forward for FY26, we expect GDP growth to sustain, supported by pick-up in rural spending, discretionary consumer demand, investment activity, and multiplier effect of the income tax reduction and RBI repo cut boost to aggregate demand along with providing durable liquidity to the system. We acknowledge that the global macro environment outlook has become more uncertain due to the recent tariff-related measures and volatility surrounding them. This may potentially impact global inflation, leading to lower growth across economies. As we see it, corporates have adopted a wait-and-watch stance as we're waiting for more clarity. We remain watchful in this area. Getting to the deposits, robust deposit franchise powered by vast distribution strength and strong 97 million customer relationships has grown our deposits to 27.1 trillion. 1.5 trillion growth in the quarter, 5.9% or 3.3 trillion in 12 months period last year, growing at a rate of 14.1%. On an average basis on the deposits, we've seen growth of 15.8% year-on-year. Savings deposits also grew by 249 billion or 4.1% sequentially. Overall CASA deposits entered the quarter at 9.4 trillion, growth of 0.7 trillion in the quarter, resulting in CASA ratio of 34.8% compared to 34% in December. Term deposits aggregating to rupees 17.7 trillion as of March end, 0.8 trillion or 4.7% during the quarter and 3 trillion rupees or 20.3% year-on-year. On the branch network, we added 312 branches during the quarter and 717 branches over the past 12 months. We added 1.8 million new liability relationships. We worked on rebalancing the funding profile with better mix of deposits and lowering borrowing, resulting in a CD ratio of 96.5% coming down from 104.4% in prior year. Borrowing mix is now at 14% of total liabilities versus 18% at the end of prior year. In terms of loans, assets, advances under management as of March end at 27.7 trillion grew by 0.9 trillion or 3.3% during the quarter and 2 trillion rupees over the prior year. On an average, AUM growth of 7.3% year-over-year. Getting to capital strength, our capital adequacy ratio is 19.6% with the CET1 at 17.2% and balance sheet remains resilient with an average LCR of about 119%. Strong revenues with resilient NIM. Revenues were at 441 billion for the quarter and for the year at 1,683 billion. Net interest margin remained in a range-bound and grew by 10% over prior year at 321 billion. The margin on a reported basis was 3.54% and on a core basis 3.46%. On an interest-earning asset basis, the reported margin was at 3.73%. Now getting to operating expenses, for the quarter, operating expenses at 176 billion, up by 2.6% over prior quarter. Expenses remained best-in-class at 1.9% of total assets and cost-to-income was at 39.8%. Getting to credit, asset quality is a key strength and a differentiator and it remains pristine. The GNPA ratio was at 1.33% as compared to 1.42% in prior quarter. GNPA ratio excluding NPAs in agricultural segment was 1.13% prior quarter 1.19%. Now getting to the total provisions, were at about 32 billion and for the quarter, prior quarter was also at about 32 billion. The total provisions coverage was at 68%. Total provisions coverage excluding agriculture was at 71%. Stock of provisions, contingent and floating provisions were approximately rupees 259 billion, contingent at 135 billion and floating provisions at 124 billion. General provisions were 109 billion. Total provisions comprising specific, floating, contingent, and general were about 172% of gross non-performing loans. This is in addition to securities held as collateral in several of the cases. The annualized credit cost ratio for the quarter was at 48 basis points. Prior quarter was at 50 basis points. Net profit after tax for the quarter was 176 billion and net profit after tax for the full year was 673 billion and grew by 10.7% over prior year. Now getting to the closing, as liquidity and economic growth improves, we are well placed to grow both in deposits and loans. Deposits, as I mentioned, grew 15.8% over prior year and loans momentum as seen in the sequential growth was at 3.3% sequential growth, which works to about the annualized rate of about 12 to 13%. This delivers a return on assets in the quarter of about 1.94% and return on equity of about 14.4%. The earnings per share in the quarter, quarterly earnings per share 23 rupees at the bank standalone level and 24.6 rupees at consolidated bank level. The book value per share on a standalone bank is rupees 655 and at the consolidated bank is at about rupees 681.9. I do want to point out the dividend that has been, dividends, board of directors recommended a dividend of rupees 22 per equity share of rupees 1 for the year ended March 31, 2025. This will be subject to the approval of shareholders at the ensuing annual general meeting. Thank you. Thanks to our employees for the remarkable performance. With that, may I request the operator to open up the line for questions.
All right. That was the HDFC Bank CFO on the bank's fourth quarter numbers that beat estimates on both the top line and the bottom line. On that note, we're going to have to slip into a short break, but don't go anywhere. We're back in just a moment with more news and updates.
Welcome back. Now on to some more earnings. Infosys missed estimates in the fourth quarter. Dollar revenue growth contracted by 4%, forcing the company to miss its full-year growth guidance. The IT major is also expecting growth to remain subdued in the entire financial year. Remma Tendulkar is here with the fine print of the Infosys numbers. Remma.
Thanks so much for that. So let me give you the key points from Infosys' numbers. One, for the March quarter, a big revenue miss. The company's topline has declined by 3.5% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, lower than street expectations. The good part is the company is giving us a guidance. They are saying in FY26 revenue growth will be 0 to 3%, slightly lower than the 1 to 4% that the street analysts were hoping for. But you know, the environment is uncertain. But the management did say that at the lower end of the guidance, which is 0%, they are baking in some deterioration in the macro. At the upper end, that's 3%, they're assuming the macros remain stable or slight improvement. Margin guidance remains unchanged at 20 to 22%. But back to Q4 now. Q4 was very weak for the company, at least in terms of the topline, at minus 3.5% revenue growth. It's also lower than peers, and because of that, the company has missed achieving its FY25 guidance. They end FY25 with a topline growth of 4.2%, lower than the 4.5 to 5% that they had guided for. That said, their margin defense has been strong. The company's EBIT margins were at 21%, very modest decline on a sequential basis, but considering the negative topline growth, it's a strong performance on the margin front. Deal wins too have inched up by 4-5% on a sequential basis at $2.6 billion. So on the whole, it's a muted Q4. The guidance is slightly lower than street expectations, but the guidance shouldn't come as a surprise based on the commentary that we've heard from the management, and the street will take comfort from the deal wins and even the margin performance.
All right, Remma, we leave it at that. Thanks very much for joining in. Now, while addressing the media earlier, the Infosys CEO and MD, Salil Parekh, commented on deal wins made by the company and how that is expected to roll out despite the looming uncertainty. Take a look.
In terms of mega deals, we had two mega deals in the last financial year. We have a pipeline of mega deals today. What is sort of what we saw in the past when things of this nature happen, which is changes in the environment, there's also an interest with clients on cost takeout, automation, and efficiency and consolidation. We will see how it plays out because it's only a few days as clients have looked at it, but we have seen large deals moving, which we have closed, moving into the next phases, as was evident.
Now IndiGo is aiming to increase its international capacity to 40% this year, says CEO Peter Elbers. Now speaking to Shireen Bhan, Elbers welcomed a grievance redressal body for customers on airfares, but he also called for correlation between the cost of doing business and airfares. Now, the IndiGo CEO also warned about the rising airport fee, saying it runs the risk of tipping over. Take a look.
The IndiGo international network started some years back, very traditional if you wish, between India and the Gulf and the Middle East countries. We've been slowly expanding that. So in '23 we started flights into Central Asia. We started flights into Nairobi. We have moved, and I had a meeting earlier this week with the CEO of Changi Airport, we moved from moving into Singapore from three Indian cities to nine today. So but that's still within that 5 to 6 hour radius. I think the next step for IndiGo is to make sure that even Europe and further parts of Asia would be accessible directly operated by IndiGo. And you know, if India is going to be the third largest economy in the world by '27, the country needs and deserves actually an airline of the size and scale and potential of the nation.
We once again seen the parliamentary panel recommend the possibility of looking at intervening in the market as far as prices are concerned. We've now got the government setting up a special cell where customers can actually talk about their complaints as far as pricing is concerned. Would you worry about the possibility of government intervention on pricing at this point in time when there's a body where customers can complain about certain things?
I think that's a good thing. There's always good for companies to have a body which keeps sort of things in balance. So I think in general to have a body like that is a good thing. Having said that, looking at the Indian market, it's one of the most, if not the most, competitive market in the world. The average price levels are extremely competitive. There has been some recent reports which made a comparison how did inflation go over the years and how did airfares go, and actually you could see that the inflation has gone much, much faster than the airfare. So we need to catch up in that in efficiency and sort of in order to keep the margins because in the long run there must be a correlation between the cost of doing business and the price of airfares, right? Otherwise you'll be out of business. Looking at the price sensitivity, a few hundred of rupees sometimes is enough to have people flying or not flying. So we should be mindful of looking how these user fees will eventually find their way into ticket prices because again at the end of the day there's a correlation between what is the cost price of a product and what is the price for the consumer eventually. So full support for all the changes. I think it's important that it's being done, but we should be mindful that at the end of the day the price of the ticket is based on different elements and this aspect is an important part of that and that should be in line with it.
Is it in line with what you believe is the kind of threshold or do you believe it's tipped over?
I think at some points it runs the risk of tipping over. You know, if you take the price of a ticket, the price of some of the UDF should, in terms of percentage and correlation, should be not too much as a total price of the ticket, right? There's going to be fuel and flying and this and that and the other. So I think again, full support for all the changes we're making, but we should be mindful of what would it do eventually for the total ticket prices.
All right. Now OpenAI has launched new AI reasoning models o3 and o4 mini, products which are developer focused with an improvement in coding abilities. Now ChatGPT is also gaining immense traction in India with users tripling in 2024 to become OpenAI's second largest global market. Now as part of our global dialogue series, CNBC TV18's Shireen Bhan spoke with Kevin Weil, the chief product officer at OpenAI, to discuss their plans for the Indian market and the Ghibli image generation tool which has gone viral in the country. Take a look.
Let me start by asking you, Kevin, to give us a snapshot in very simple language. What does ChatGPT 4.1 mean for OpenAI and for consumers, and how do o3 and o4 mini change the game?
Yeah, well first of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here with you. India is an incredibly important market for OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's our second largest market. It's our fastest growing market, and it's also the market where we saw our image generation just take off. But we had some great launches this week. You mentioned GPT-4.1, which was a model for developers that is fantastic at coding and complex instruction following. And so, you know, that was a model that we released focused on developers, and we're seeing them, you know, we have over 3 million developers on the OpenAI platform and they're doing amazing things. That is one of our fastest growing models by usage ever. And then just this morning in the US we launched o3 and o4 mini, which are our frontier reasoning models. They're the smartest, fastest, safest models that we have ever launched. They're incredible at things like computer programming. So if you look at measures like on competitive coding benchmarks, these models would be better at competitive coding than all but about 200 people in the world. And they can answer hard PhD-level science questions better than 80% of PhDs in their field across all fields simultaneously. So they're really very intelligent models, but you can also use them for more mundane tasks: understanding medical jargon or looking at what's happening in the world, creating images, helping you with writing, translating languages. You know, these models are so dynamic and we're super excited to see what people can do with them.
Let's talk about what you're seeing in India. You talked about how it is today your fastest growing market for ChatGPT. How many active users do you have in India? What surprised you about the adoption, the rate of adoption, the pace of adoption in India? Why do you believe you've seen this kind of an uptick here?
Yeah, I mean, our active users in India tripled, more than tripled, in 2024. So it's been incredible to watch. A few weeks ago we launched a new image generation tool using AI to generate incredibly, you know, images that you can control to a great degree, whether you want them to be vivid and lifelike or cartoony or following a particular style. We saw, you know, Prime Minister Modi tweet using our image gen feature. We had cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar tweet images from ChatGPT and it just took off. I mean, unlike anything I've ever seen. I've been fortunate to be at Twitter for many years. I led product at Instagram for a number of years. I mean, these companies were growing very quickly. I have never seen anything grow like ChatGPT was growing because people were having so much fun creating these images, sharing them with their friends on WhatsApp and in other places. And it's just incredible to see. So we marshaled a whole lot of resources. We really tried to support it, especially in India. We released new features around our image gen, like image galleries that let you quickly view all of the images that you've created. There's just a huge amount of excitement in India for ChatGPT, and not just for this image gen feature, but also, you know, ChatGPT speaks 100 languages, it can teach you any subject you want to learn, it can save you time at home and at work. And so, you know, it's just so broadly useful and it's completely free. You don't have to pay us a dime. You can use it on an Android phone for free. So it's just, you know, we deeply believe in bringing AI to the world and the positive impacts that that can make. And I can't think of a better example than what's happening in India right now with ChatGPT.
All right, on that note we're going to wrap up this special edition of Earning Central. More news and updates will continue right here on CNBC TV18. For now, it's a goodbye. Thank you for watching.
Quarter numbers beat street estimates with profits up about 6.7% and net interest income up 10.3% over the previous year. Asset quality improved while the net interest margins on total assets came in at a seven-quarter high. Abhishek Kotari is joining in with the numbers.
Well, HDFC Bank reported its Q4 FY25 numbers. Numbers were strong, especially on the core operating profit growth, which was up more than 20% year-on-year and about 4.9% on a sequential basis. So take a look at the net interest margin on total assets. It's at a seven-quarter high of about 3.54% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Now this has a one-off of about 7 to 8 basis points with respect to net interest margin. So even then it comes down to 3.46% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Analysts were estimating a decline in net interest margin. However, they have expanded without including even the one-off income over there. Take a look at the cost-to-income ratio. It's at a four-quarter low of 39.8% versus 40.6% in the previous quarter. The annualized quarterly slippage ratio is at a five-quarter low, coming in at 1.15% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. Overall, the slippages have declined nearly 15% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, which is heartening to see. Their asset quality remains impeccable and continues to improve, with one of the best in the industry. A gross NPA ratio is at 1.3% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. The net NPA ratio has also declined by three basis points on a sequential basis. The other key highlights being the net interest income growth is about 10.3% year-on-year and about 4.6% sequentially. They have been able to command better yield because the loan growth is at just 5.5% year-on-year and about 4% sequentially. The OPEX has remained under control for them, which has helped the operating profit growth. OPEX have declined by 2.3% year-on-year and grown by only 2.6% quarter-on-quarter. Overall, the provisions are down 76.5% year-on-year, but they have increased by just 1.2% sequentially. So PAT is a growth of 6.7% year-on-year and about 5.3% quarter-on-quarter overall. Good set of numbers coming in from HDFC Bank, especially on the core operating profit growth. Back to you.
Well, the other big lender, ICICI Bank, reported a mixed set of numbers with business momentum slowing down while profitability was above street estimates. Abhishek, tell us more on that front.
Mixed set of numbers coming in from ICICI Bank. Weak with respect to business momentum that you are seeing for them, while the P&L continues to remain strong for them. Take a look at the deposit growth: 14% year-on-year and about 5.9% sequentially. Year-on-year, it's the weakest deposit growth that you are seeing in the last eight quarters. Now advances growth is at 13.3% year-on-year and just 2.1% quarter-on-quarter. So year-on-year, this 13.3% growth is the weakest that you are seeing in the last 17 quarters, and sequentially it's one of the weakest loan growth that you are seeing in the last 15 quarters. So loan growth remains very weak for them compared to their historical numbers. The net interest margin is at a five-quarter high of 4.41% versus 4.25%. The core operating profit growth is at a five-quarter high of 13.7% year-on-year and 5.5% sequentially. The quarterly annualized slippage ratio, that's heartening to see. It's a 17-quarter low of 1.5% versus 1.85% in the previous quarter. Their asset quality continues to improve and remains one of the best that you are seeing in the last 10 years or even more. Gross NPA ratio down to 1.67% versus 1.96% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio down to 0.39% versus 0.42% in the previous quarter. So asset quality and P&L gets a thumbs up, while weak business momentum, weak loan growth, actually impacts the balance sheet. Back to you.
All right. And finally, Yes Bank also reported its fourth quarter numbers where net profits saw a 63% rise on a year-on-year basis. Take us through the details, Abhishek.
Well, control over cost of funds has actually held the net interest margin and the P&L of Yes Bank in this quarter. So take a look at the P&L versus Apollo. The NII has a beat of 4.3% while the PAT beat is about 23.5%. Net interest margin is at an eight-quarter high of 2.5%. The loan growth is very weak, one of the weakest that you are seeing in the last seven quarters, just 8.1% year-on-year and about 0.55% sequentially. The securities receipts are now nil, so basically they are now zero. Other income has also aided the topline growth for them. So other income is up 15% quarter-on-quarter as fee income is up 21.5% on a sequential basis. So overall, the loan growth was weak, but they made up in the fees. Fee income was very strong for them. So cost-to-income ratio hence is at the lowest in the last 15 quarters, coming in at 67.3% versus 71.1% in the previous quarter as OPEX has declined by more than 4% year-on-year. Annualized slippage ratio is at a 10-quarter low, coming in at less than 2%, 1.99% versus 2.2% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio is one of the lowest that you are seeing in the last eight years or even more. Net NPA ratio is now down to 0.3% versus 0.5% in the previous quarter. A quarterly annualized credit cost is at a four-quarter high of 1.48% versus 1.26% in the previous quarter. Looks like there might have been a bit of write-off which caught provisioning this time around. Return ratios, they are one of the best for the bank in the last 25 quarters, but one of the weakest when you see with respect to peers, underperforming because return ratios continue to remain tepid when compared to peers, but one of the best in 25 quarters. ROA at 7% versus 6% in the previous quarter. ROE at 6.2% when compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter.
Thanks very much. Let's cut across to HDFC Bank's earnings con-call being addressed by their CFO, Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
Driven by favorable monsoon and increased Rabi sowing, well for strong agricultural performance. This would be further supported by gradually improving manufacturing sector and steady service sector output. Getting to, as we look forward for FY26, we expect GDP growth to sustain, supported by pick-up in rural spending, discretionary consumer demand, investment activity, and multiplier effect of the income tax reduction and RBI repo cut boost to aggregate demand along with providing durable liquidity to the system. We acknowledge that the global macro environment outlook has become more uncertain due to the recent tariff-related measures and volatility surrounding them. This may potentially impact global inflation, leading to lower growth across economies. As we see it, corporates have adopted a wait-and-watch stance as we are waiting for more clarity. We remain watchful in this area. Getting to the deposits, robust deposit franchise powered by vast distribution strength and strong 97 million customer relationships has grown our deposits to 27.1 trillion. 1.5 trillion growth in the quarter, 5.9% or 3.3 trillion in 12 months period last year, growing at the rate of 14.1%. On an average basis on the deposits, we've seen growth of 15.8% year-on-year. Savings deposits also grew by 249 billion or 4.1% sequentially. Overall CASA deposits entered the quarter at 9.4 trillion, growth of 0.7 trillion in the quarter, resulting in CASA ratio of 34.8% compared to 34% in December. Term deposits aggregating to rupees 17.7 trillion as of March end, 0.8 trillion or 4.7% during the quarter and 3 trillion rupees or 20.3% year-on-year. On the branch network, we added 312 branches during the quarter and 717 branches over the past 12 months. We added 1.8 million new liability relationships. We worked on rebalancing the funding profile with better mix of deposits and lowering borrowing, resulting in a CD ratio of 96.5% coming down from 104.4% in prior year. Borrowing mix is now at 14% of total liabilities versus 18% at the end of prior year. In terms of loans, assets, advances under management as of March end at 27.7 trillion grew by 0.9 trillion or 3.3% during the quarter and 2 trillion rupees over the prior year. On an average, AUM growth of 7.3% year-over-year. Getting to capital strength, our capital adequacy ratio is 19.6% with the CET1 at 17.2% and balance sheet remains resilient with an average LCR of about 119%. Strong revenues with resilient NIM. Revenues were at 441 billion for the quarter and for the year at 1,683 billion. Net interest margin remained in a range-bound and grew by 10% over prior year at 321 billion. The margin on a reported basis was 3.54% and on a core basis 3.46%. On an interest-earning asset basis, the reported margin was at 3.73%. Now getting to operating expenses, for the quarter, operating expenses at 176 billion, up by 2.6% over prior quarter. Expenses remained best-in-class at 1.9% of total assets and cost-to-income was at 39.8%. Getting to credit, asset quality is a key strength and a differentiator and it remains pristine. The GNPA ratio was at 1.33% as compared to 1.42% in prior quarter. GNPA ratio excluding NPAs in agricultural segment was 1.13% prior quarter 1.19%. Now getting to the total provisions, were at about 32 billion and for the quarter, prior quarter was also at about 32 billion. The total provisions coverage was at 68%. Total provisions coverage excluding agriculture was at 71%. Stock of provisions, contingent and floating provisions were approximately rupees 259 billion, contingent at 135 billion and floating provisions at 124 billion. General provisions were 109 billion. Total provisions comprising specific, floating, contingent, and general were about 172% of gross non-performing loans. This is in addition to securities held as collateral in several of the cases. The annualized credit cost ratio for the quarter was at 48 basis points. Prior quarter was at 50 basis points. Net profit after tax for the quarter was 176 billion and net profit after tax for the full year was 673 billion and grew by 10.7% over prior year. Now getting to the closing, as liquidity and economic growth improves, we are well placed to grow both in deposits and loans. Deposits, as I mentioned, grew 15.8% over prior year and loans momentum as seen in the sequential growth was at 3.3% sequential growth, which works to about the annualized rate of about 12 to 13%. This delivers a return on assets in the quarter of about 1.94% and return on equity of about 14.4%. The earnings per share in the quarter, quarterly earnings per share 23 rupees at the bank standalone level and 24.6 rupees at consolidated bank level. The book value per share on a standalone bank is rupees 655 and at the consolidated bank is at about rupees 681.9. I do want to point out the dividend that has been, dividends, board of directors recommended a dividend of rupees 22 per equity share of rupees 1 for the year ended March 31, 2025. This will be subject to the approval of shareholders at the ensuing annual general meeting. Thank you. Thanks to our employees for the remarkable performance. With that, may I request the operator to open up the line for questions.
All right. That was the HDFC Bank CFO on the bank's fourth quarter numbers that beat estimates on both the top line and the bottom line. On that note, we're going to have to slip into a short break, but don't go anywhere. We're back in just a moment with more news and updates.
Welcome back. Now on to some more earnings. Infosys missed estimates in the fourth quarter. Dollar revenue growth contracted by 4%, forcing the company to miss its full-year growth guidance. The IT major is also expecting growth to remain subdued in the entire financial year. Remma Tendulkar is here with the fine print of the Infosys numbers. Remma.
Thanks so much for that. So let me give you the key points from Infosys' numbers. One, for the March quarter, a big revenue miss. The company's topline has declined by 3.5% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, lower than street expectations. The good part is the company is giving us a guidance. They are saying in FY26 revenue growth will be 0 to 3%, slightly lower than the 1 to 4% that the street analysts were hoping for. But you know, the environment is uncertain. But the management did say that at the lower end of the guidance, which is 0%, they are baking in some deterioration in the macro. At the upper end, that's 3%, they're assuming the macros remain stable or slight improvement. Margin guidance remains unchanged at 20 to 22%. But back to Q4 now. Q4 was very weak for the company, at least in terms of the topline, at minus 3.5% revenue growth. It's also lower than peers, and because of that, the company has missed achieving its FY25 guidance. They end FY25 with a topline growth of 4.2%, lower than the 4.5 to 5% that they had guided for. That said, their margin defense has been strong. The company's EBIT margins were at 21%, very modest decline on a sequential basis, but considering the negative topline growth, it's a strong performance on the margin front. Deal wins too have inched up by 4-5% on a sequential basis at $2.6 billion. So on the whole, it's a muted Q4. The guidance is slightly lower than street expectations, but the guidance shouldn't come as a surprise based on the commentary that we've heard from the management, and the street will take comfort from the deal wins and even the margin performance.
All right, Remma, we leave it at that. Thanks very much for joining in. Now, while addressing the media earlier, the Infosys CEO and MD, Salil Parekh, commented on deal wins made by the company and how that is expected to roll out despite the looming uncertainty. Take a look.
In terms of mega deals, we had two mega deals in the last financial year. We have a pipeline of mega deals today. What is sort of what we saw in the past when things of this nature happen, which is changes in the environment, there's also an interest with clients on cost takeout, automation, and efficiency and consolidation.
consolidation. We will see how it plays out because it's only a few days as clients have looked at it, but we have seen large deals moving in which we have closed, moving into the next phases as was evident.
Now Indigo is aiming to increase its international capacity to 40% this year, says CEO Peter Elbers. Now speaking to Shireen Bhan, Elbers welcomed a grievance redressal body for customers on airfares, but he also called for correlation between the cost of doing business and airfares. Now the Indigo CEO also warned about the rising airport fee, saying it runs the risk of tipping over. Take a look.
The Indigo international network chain started some years back, very traditional if you wish, between India and the Gulf and the Middle East countries. We've been slowly, slowly expanding that. So in '23 we started flights into Central Asia, we started flights into Nairobi. We had moved, and I had a meeting earlier this week with the CEO of Changi Airport, we moved from moving into Singapore from three Indian cities to nine today. So, but that's still within that 5 to 6 hour radius. I think the next step for Indigo is to make sure that even Europe and further parts of Asia would be accessible directly operated by Indigo. And you know, if India is going to be the third largest economy in the world by '27, the country needs and deserves actually an airline of the size and scale and potential of the nation.
We've once again seen the parliamentary panel recommend the possibility of looking at intervening in the market as far as prices are concerned. We've now got the government setting up a special cell where customers can actually talk about their complaints as far as pricing is concerned. Would you worry about the possibility of government intervention on pricing at this point in time?
Well, when there's a body where customers can complain about certain things, I think that's a good thing. It's always good for companies to have a body which keeps sort of things in balance. So I think in general to have a body like that is a good thing. Having said that, looking at the Indian market, it is one of the most, if not the most, competitive market in the world. The average price levels are extremely competitive. There has been some recent reports which made a comparison: how did inflation go over the years and how did airfares go? And actually you could see that the inflation has gone much, much faster than the airfare. So we need to catch up in that, in efficiency and sort of in order to keep the margins, because in the long run there must be a correlation between the cost of doing business and the price of airfares, right? Otherwise you'll be out of business. Looking at the price sensitivity, a few hundred of rupees sometimes is enough to have people flying or not flying. So we should be mindful of looking how these user fees will eventually find their way into ticket prices, because again at the end of the day there's a correlation between what is the cost price of a product and what is the price for the consumer eventually. So full support for all the changes, I think it's important that it's being done, but we should be mindful that you know at the end of the day the price of the ticket is based on different elements and this aspect is an important part of that and that should be in line with it.
Is it in line with what you believe is the kind of threshold or do you believe it's tipped over?
I think at some points it runs the risk of tipping over. You know, if you take the price of a ticket, the price of some of the UDF should, in terms of percentage and correlation, should be not too much as a total price of the ticket, right? There's going to be fuel and flying and this and that and the other. So I think again, full support for all the changes we're making, but we should be mindful of what would it do eventually for the total ticket prices.
All right. Now OpenAI has launched new AI reasoning models o3 and o4 mini, products which are developer-focused with an improvement in coding abilities. Now ChatGPT is also gaining immense traction in India with users tripling in 2024 to become OpenAI's second largest global market. Now as part of our global dialogue series, CNBC-TV18's Shireen Bhan spoke with Kevin Weil, the Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, to discuss their plans for the Indian market and the Ghibli image generation tool which has gone viral in the country. Take a look.
Let me start by asking you, Kevin, to give us a snapshot in very simple language. What does ChatGPT 4.1 mean for OpenAI and for consumers, and how do o3 and o4 mini change the game?
Yeah, well first of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here with you. India is an incredibly important market for OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's our second largest market, it's our fastest growing market, and it's also the market where we saw our image generation just take off. But we had some great launches this week. You mentioned GPT-4.1, which was a model for developers that is fantastic at coding and complex instruction following. And so, you know, that was a model that we released focused on developers, and we're seeing them, you know, we have over 3 million developers on the OpenAI platform and they're doing amazing things. That is one of our fastest growing models by usage ever. And then just this morning in the US we launched o3 and o4 mini, which are our frontier reasoning models. They're the smartest, fastest, safest models that we have ever launched. They're incredible at things like computer programming. So if you look at measures like on competitive coding benchmarks, these models would be better at competitive coding than all but about 200 people in the world. And they can answer hard PhD-level science questions better than 80% of PhDs in their field across all fields simultaneously. So they're really very intelligent models. But you can also use them for, you know, more mundane tasks: understanding medical jargon or looking at what's happening in the world, creating images, helping you with writing, translating languages. You know, these models are so dynamic and we're super excited to see what people can do with them.
Let's talk about what you're seeing in India. You talked about how it is today your fastest growing market for ChatGPT. You know, how many active users do you have in India? What surprised you about the adoption, the rate of adoption, the pace of adoption in India? Why do you believe you've seen this kind of an uptick here?
Yeah, I mean, our active users in India tripled, more than tripled in 2024. So it's been incredible to watch. We a few weeks ago we launched a new image generation tool using AI to generate incredibly, you know, images that you can control to a great degree, whether you want them to be vivid and lifelike or cartoony or following a particular style. We saw, you know, Prime Minister Modi tweeted using our image gen feature. We had cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar tweet images from ChatGPT and it just took off. I mean, unlike anything I've ever seen. I've been fortunate to be at Twitter for many years, I led product at Instagram for a number of years. I mean, these companies were growing very quickly. I have never seen anything grow like ChatGPT was growing because people were having so much fun creating these images, sharing them with their friends, you know, on WhatsApp and in other places. And it's just incredible to see. So we marshaled a whole lot of resources, we really tried to support it, especially in India. We released new features around our image gen like image galleries that let you quickly view all of the images that you've created. There's just a huge amount of excitement in India for ChatGPT and not just for this image gen feature, but also, you know, ChatGPT speaks 100 languages, it can teach you any subject you want to learn, it can save you time at home and at work. And so, you know, it's just so broadly useful and it's completely free. You don't have to pay us a dime. You can use it on an Android phone for free. So, you know, we deeply believe in bringing AI to the world and the positive impacts that that can make. And I can't think of a better example than what's happening in India right now with ChatGPT.
All right, on that note we're going to wrap up this special edition of Earning Central. More news and updates will continue right here on CNBC-TV18. For now, goodbye. Thank you for watching.
Fourth quarter numbers beat street estimates with profits up about 6.7% and net interest income up 10.3% over the previous year. Asset quality improved while the net interest margins on total assets came in at a seven-quarter high. Abhishek is joining in with the numbers.
Well, HDFC Bank reported its Q4 FY25 numbers. The numbers were strong, especially on the core operating profit growth which was up more than 20% year-on-year and about 4.9% on a sequential basis. So take a look at the net interest margin on total assets. It's at a seven-quarter high of about 3.54% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Now this has a one-off of about 7 to 8 basis points with respect to net interest margin. So even then it comes down to 3.46% versus 3.43% in the previous quarter. Analysts were estimating a decline in net interest margin. However, they have expanded without including even the one-off income over there. Take a look at the cost to income ratio. It's at a four-quarter low of 39.8% versus 40.6% in the previous quarter. The annualized quarterly slippage ratio is at a five-quarter low coming in at 1.15% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. Overall the slippages have declined nearly 15% on a quarter-on-quarter basis which is heartening to see. Their asset quality remains impeccable and continues to improve with one of the best in the industry. Gross NPA ratio is at 1.3% versus 1.4% in the previous quarter. The net NPA ratio has also declined by three basis points on a sequential basis. The other key highlights being the net interest income growth is about 10.3% year-on-year and about 4.6% sequentially. They have been able to command better because the loan growth is at just 5.5% year-on-year and about 4% sequentially. The OPEX has remained under control for them which has helped the operating profit growth. OPEX have declined by 2.3% year-on-year and grown by only 2.6% quarter-on-quarter. Overall the provisions are down 76.5% year-on-year but they have increased by just 1.2% sequentially. So PAT is a growth of 6.7% year-on-year and about 5.3% quarter-on-quarter overall. Good sense, good numbers coming in from HDFC Bank especially on the core operating profit growth. Back to you.
Well, the other big lender ICICI Bank reported a mixed set of numbers with business momentum slowing down while profitability was above street estimates. Abhishek, tell us more on that front.
Mixed set of numbers coming in from ICICI Bank. Weak with respect to business momentum that you are seeing for them while the P&L continues to remain strong for them. Take a look at the deposit growth: 14% year-on-year and about 5.9% sequentially. Year-on-year it's the weakest deposit growth that you are seeing in last eight quarters. Now advances growth is at 13.3% year-on-year and just 2.1% quarter-on-quarter. So year-on-year this 13.3% growth is the weakest that you are seeing in last 17 quarters and sequentially it's one of the weakest loan growth that you are seeing in last 15 quarters. So loan growth remains very weak for them compared to their historical numbers. The net interest margin is at a five-quarter high of 4.41% versus 4.25%. The core operating profit growth is at a five-quarter high of 13.7% year-on-year and 5.5% sequentially. The quarterly annualized slippage ratio, that's heartening to see, it's at a 17-quarter low of 1.5% versus 1.85% in the previous quarter. Their asset quality continues to improve and remains one of the best that you are seeing in last 10 years or even more. Gross NPA ratio down to 1.67% versus 1.96% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio down to 0.39% versus 0.42% in the previous quarter. So asset quality and P&L gets a thumbs up while weak business momentum of weak loan growth actually impacts the balance sheet. Back to you.
All right. And finally, Yes Bank also reported its fourth quarter numbers where net profits saw a 63% rise on a year-on-year basis. Take us through the details, Abhishek.
Well, control over cost of funds has actually held the net interest margin and the P&L of Yes Bank in this quarter. So take a look at the P&L versus Apollo. The NII has a beat of 4.3% while the PAT beat is about 23.5%. Net interest margin is at an eight-quarter high of 2.5%. The loan growth is very weak, one of the weakest that you are seeing in last seven quarters, just 8.1% year-on-year and about 0.55% sequentially. The securities receipts are now nil, so basically they are now zero. Other income has also aided the topline growth for them. So other income is up 15% quarter-on-quarter as fee income is up 21.5% on a sequential basis. So overall the loan growth was weak but they made up in the fees. Fee income was very strong for them. So cost to income ratio hence is at the lowest in last 15 quarters coming in at 67.3% versus 71.1% in the previous quarter as OPEX has declined by more than 4% year-on-year. Annualized slippage ratio is at a 10-quarter low coming in at less than 2%, 1.99% versus 2.2% in the previous quarter. Net NPA ratio is one of the lowest that you are seeing in last 8 years or even more. Net NPA ratio is now down to 0.3% versus 0.5% in the previous quarter. A quarterly annualized credit cost is at a four-quarter high of 1.48% versus 1.26% in the previous quarter. Looks like there might have been a bit of write-off which caught provisioning this time around. Return ratios, they are one of the best for the bank in last 25 quarters but one of the weakest when you see with respect to peers performing because return ratios continues to remain tepid when compared to peers but one of the best in 25 quarters. ROA at 7% versus 6% in the previous quarter, ROE at 6.2% when compared to 5.2% in the previous quarter.
Thanks very much. Let's cut across to HDFC Bank's earnings call being addressed by their CFO Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
Driven by favorable monsoon and increased Rabi sowing, well for strong agricultural performance. This would be further supported by gradually improving manufacturing sector and steady service sector output. As we look forward for FY26, we expect GDP growth to sustain, supported by pick up in rural spending, discretionary consumer demand, investment activity and multiplier effect of the income tax reduction and RBI repo cut boost to aggregate demand along with providing durable liquidity to the system. We acknowledge that the global macro environment outlook has become more uncertain due to the recent tariff-related measures and volatility surrounding them. This may potentially impact global inflation leading to lower growth across economies. As we see it, corporates have adopted a wait-and-watch stance as we're waiting for more clarity. We remain watchful in this area.
Getting to the deposits. Robust deposit franchise powered by vast distribution strength and strong 97 million customer relationships has grown our deposits to 27.1 trillion. 1.5 trillion growth in the quarter, 5.9% or 3.3 trillion in 12 months period last year, growing at a rate of 14.1%. On an average basis on the deposits, we have seen growth of 15.8% year-on-year. Savings deposits also grew by 249 billion or 4.1% sequentially. Overall CASA deposits ended the quarter at 9.4 trillion, growth of 0.7 trillion in the quarter resulting in CASA ratio of 34.8% compared to 34% in December. Term deposits aggregating to rupees 17.7 trillion as of March end, 0.8 trillion or 4.7% during the quarter and 3 trillion rupees or 20.3% year-on-year. On the branch network, we added 312 branches during the quarter and 717 branches over the past 12 months. We added 1.8 million new liability relationships. We worked on rebalancing the funding profile with better mix of deposits and lowering borrowing resulting in a CD ratio of 96.12% coming down from 104.4% in prior year. Borrowing mix is now at 14% of total liabilities versus 18% at the end of prior year.
In terms of loans, assets advances under management as of March end at 27.7 trillion grew by 0.9 trillion or 3.3% during the quarter and 2 trillion rupees over the prior year. On an average, AUM growth of 7.3% year-over-year. Getting to capital strength, our capital adequacy ratio is 19.6% with the CET1 at 17.2% and balance sheet remains resilient with an average LCR of about 119%.
Strong revenues with a resilient NIM. Revenues were at 441 billion for the quarter and for the year at 1,683 billion. Net interest margin remained in a rangebound and grew by 10% over prior year at 321 billion. The margin on a reported basis was 3.54% and on a core basis 3.46%. On an interest earning asset basis, the reported margin was at 3.73%. Now getting to operating expenses for the quarter, operating expenses at 176 billion, up by 2.6% over prior quarter. Expenses remained best-in-class at 1.9% of total assets and cost to income was at 39.8%.
Getting to credit, asset quality is a key strength and a differentiator and it remains pristine. The GNP ratio was at 1.33% as compared to 1.42% in prior quarter. GNPA ratio excluding NPAs in agricultural segment was 1.13% prior quarter 1.19%. Now getting to the total provisions were at about 32 billion and for the year, for the quarter, prior quarter was also at about 32 billion. The total provisions coverage was at 68%. Total provisions coverage excluding agriculture was at 71%. Talk of provisions, contingent and floating provisions were approximately rupees 259 billion, contingent at 135 billion and floating provisions at 124 billion. General provisions were 109 billion. Total provisions comprising specific, floating, contingent and general were about 172% of gross non-performing loans. This is in addition to securities held as collateral in several of the cases. The annualized credit cost ratio for the quarter was at 48 basis points. Prior quarter was at 50 basis points. Net profit after tax for the year, for the quarter, net profit after tax for the quarter was 176 billion and net profit after tax for the full year was 673 billion and grew by 10.7% over prior year.
Now getting to the closing, as liquidity and economic growth improves, we are well placed to grow both in deposits and loans. Deposits as I mentioned grew 15.8% over prior year and loans momentum as seen in the sequential growth was at 3.3% sequential growth which works to about the annualized rate of about 12 to 13%. This delivers a return on assets in the quarter of about 1.94% and return on equity of about 14.4%. The earnings per share in the quarter, quarterly earnings per share 23 rupees at the bank standalone level and 24.6 rupees at consolidated bank level. The book value per share on a standalone bank is rupees 655 and at the consolidated bank is at about rupees 681.9. I do want to point out to the dividend that has been, dividends, board of directors recommended a dividend of rupees 22 per equity share of rupees 1 for the year ended March 31, 2025. This will be subject to the approval of shareholders at the ensuing annual general meeting. Thank you. Thanks to our employees for the remarkable performance. With that, may I request the operator to open up the line for questions.
All right. That was the HDFC Bank CFO on the bank's fourth quarter numbers that beat estimates on both the top line and the bottom line. On that note we're going to have to slip into a short break, but don't go anywhere. We're back in just a moment with more news and updates.
Welcome back. Now onto some more earnings. Infosys missed estimates in the fourth quarter. Dollar revenue growth contracted by 4% forcing the company to miss its full-year growth guidance. The IT major is also expecting growth to remain subdued in the entire financial year. Remma Tendulkar is here with the fine print of the Infosys numbers.
Remma, thanks so much for that. So let me give you the key points from Infy's numbers. One, for the March quarter, a big revenue miss. The company's topline has declined by 3.5% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, lower than street expectations. The good part is the company is giving us a guidance. They are saying in FY26 revenue growth will be 0 to 3%, slightly lower than the 1 to 4% that the street analysts were hoping for. But you know, the environment is uncertain. What the management did say that at the lower end of the guidance, which is 0%, they are baking in some deterioration in the macro. At the upper end, that's 3%, they're assuming the macros remain stable or slight improvement. Margin guidance remains unchanged at 20 to 22%. But back to Q4 now. Q4 was very weak for the company at least in terms of the top line at minus 3.5% revenue growth. It's also lower than peers and because of that the company has missed achieving its FY25 guidance. They end FY25 with a topline growth of 4.2%, lower than the 4.5 to 5% that they guided for. That said, their margin defense has been strong. The company's EBIT margins were at 21%, very modest decline on a sequential basis but considering the negative topline growth, it's a strong performance on the margin front. Deals too have inched up by 4-5% on a sequential basis at $2.6 billion. So on the whole, it's a muted Q4. The guidance is slightly lower than street expectations but the guidance shouldn't come as a surprise based on the commentary that we've heard from the management and the street will take comfort from the deal wins and even the marginal performance.
All right, Remma, we leave it at that. Thanks very much for joining in. Now while addressing the media earlier, the Infosys CEO and MD Salil Parekh commented on deal wins made by the company and how that is expected to roll out despite the looming uncertainty. Take a look.
In terms of mega deals, we had two mega deals in the last financial year. We have a pipeline of mega deals today. What is sort of what we saw in the past when things of this nature happen, which is changes in the environment, there's also an interest with clients on cost takeout, automation and efficiency and consolidation. We will see how it plays out because it's only a few days as clients have looked at it, but we have seen large deals moving in which we have closed, moving into the next phases as was evident.
