BENGALURU (Reuters) – Shares of Kotak Mahindra Bank rose as much as 5.5 percent on Monday after the private lender’s quarterly profit beat estimates and said the central bank’s recent regulatory measures would have very little financial impact.
The lender’s shares last rose 5.2% to Rs 1,626 after posting their best intraday gain since April 11, 2023.
Kotak shares have fallen 14.7% so far this year – mainly due to the Reserve Bank of India’s ban on onboarding new customers digitally and issuing credit cards – while the Nifty banking index has risen 1.7%.
Kotak CEO Ashok Vaswani said during an analyst conference on Saturday that the RBI order is expected to have minimal financial impact and may impact the bank’s pre-tax profit by around Rs 3-4.5 lakh crore in 2024-25.
The estimated impact is “encouraging,” said analyst Suresh Ganapathy at Macquarie Capital.
“We expect growth to remain above industry average despite RBI sanctions,” PhillipCapital analysts said in a note.
The bank on Saturday reported a 26% rise in fourth-quarter net profit, beating analysts’ expectations, on higher core lending revenues and healthy loan growth.
Beyond the short-term headwinds (due to the RBI ban), the bank can deliver mid- to high-double-digit earnings per share growth in the medium term, CLSA analysts said.
(Reporting by Sethuraman NR in Bengaluru and Siddhi Nayak in Mumbai; Editing by Sohini Goswami)
