PNB Q1 net nearly halves, shares up on stable bad loan ratio

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Punjab National Bank , India's fourth-biggest state-run lender by assets, reported on Tuesday a 49 percent drop in quarterly profit as provisions nearly doubled.

The stock, however, jumped as much 6.7 percent as the bank's bad loan ratio fell marginally in the three months to June, compared with the previous quarter. The stock closed nearly 5 percent higher.

Net profit fell to 7.21 billion rupees ($112.61 million) for its fiscal first quarter to June 30, from 14.05 billion rupees reported a year earlier, the New Delhi-based lender said. Analysts on average had expected a net profit of 9 billion rupees, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters.

Gross bad loans as a percentage of total loans fell slightly to 6.47 percent in the June quarter from 6.55 percent in the previous three months, but were higher than 5.48 percent a year earlier. Provisions, including for bad loans, nearly doubled from a year earlier to 18.11 billion rupees.

($1 = 64.0275 rupees)

(Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Sunil Nair)