ICICI Bank Q3 net falls 19 percent, bad loans rise

MUMBAI (Reuters) - ICICI Bank Ltd, India's No.2 lender by assets, said its third-quarter net profit fell 19 percent as bad loans rose, although the profit decline was smaller than expected.

Net profit fell to 24.42 billion rupees ($360 million) for the three months to Dec. 31, from 30.18 billion rupees reported a year earlier, the Mumbai-based lender said on Tuesday.

That compared with an average forecast of 21.7 billion rupees from a poll of 23 analysts, Thomson Reuters data shows.

Bad loans as a percentage of total loans rose to 7.91 percent at the end of December, from 6.82 percent at the end of September and 4.72 percent a year ago.

 

($1 = 67.8379 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Himani Sarkar)