Union Bank Q1 net profit falls 22 percent, bad loans rise

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Union Bank of India , the nation's sixth-biggest state-run lender by assets, reported a smaller-than-expected 22 percent fall in quarterly profit even as bad loans rose.

Net profit fell to 5.19 billion rupees ($81 million) during its fiscal first quarter to June 30, from 6.64 billion rupees reported a year earlier, the Mumbai-based lender said. Analysts on average had expected a net profit of 4.99 billion rupees, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters.

Gross bad loans as a percentage of total loans rose to 5.53 percent in the June quarter from 4.96 percent in the previous three months and 4.27 percent in the same period a year earlier.

($1 = 64.0600 rupees)

(Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Biju Dwarakanath)