Bank of India Q1 net plunges 84 percent; bad loans zoom

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Bank of India , the nation's third-biggest state-run lender by assets, reported a sharply bigger-than-expected 84 percent fall in quarterly profit as bad loans surged.

Net profit fell to 1.3 billion rupees ($20.3 million) for its fiscal first quarter to June 30, from 8.06 billion rupees reported a year earlier, the Mumbai-based lender said. Analysts on average had expected a net profit of 3.31 billion rupees, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters.

Gross bad loans as a percentage of total loans rose to 6.8 percent in the June quarter from 5.39 percent in the previous three months and 3.28 percent a year earlier.

 

($1 = 64.0200 rupees)

(Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Sunil Nair)