ICICI Bank bad loans jump in Q3; net profit in line with estimates

MUMBAI (Reuters) - ICICI Bank Ltd, India's biggest private sector lender by assets, reported a surge in bad loans for the December quarter partly due to a central bank direction to reclassify some troubled loan accounts as bad loans.

Net profit rose 4.5 percent to 30.18 billion rupees ($443 million) for its fiscal third quarter to Dec. 31, from 28.89 billion rupees reported a year earlier, the bank said in a statement on Thursday.

Analysts on average had expected a net profit of 30.17 billion rupees for the bank, which is also listed in New York .

Gross bad loans as a percentage of total loans widened to 4.72 percent in the December quarter from 3.77 percent in the previous three months.

 

($1 = 68.1100 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Subhranshu Sahu)