ICICI Bank Q4 net profit jumps but lags estimates

MUMBAI (Reuters) - ICICI Bank Ltd, India's third-biggest lender by assets, reported a smaller-than-expected growth in fourth-quarter net profit as bad loans rose.

Standalone net profit nearly tripled to 20.25 billion rupees ($315.7 million) for the three months to March 31, from 7.02 billion rupees reported a year earlier, the Mumbai-based lender said on Wednesday.

Analysts on average had expected a net profit of 22.04 billion rupees, according to Thomson Reuters data.

The bank's gross bad loans as a percentage of total loans rose to 7.89 percent as of end-March, from 7.2 percent at the end of December and 5.21 percent a year earlier.

($1 = 64.1500 rupees)

(Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy and Promit Mukherjee; Editing by Randy Fabi)