Mumbai: Small-ticket personal loans below ₹50,000 and some higher-end personal loans are seeing some stress, according to Amitabh Chaudhry, managing director of Axis Bank. Speaking to investors in Singapore, as per a Macquarie report, Chaudhry also highlighted some specific concerns about capital expenditure (capex) demand.
He mentioned that securing equity for large projects is difficult, and banks are adopting a conservative stance. While initiatives like the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme show promise, substantial capacity expansion, especially with large projects, remains challenging. However, there is an emerging ecosystem supporting smaller manufacturing projects, with venture capitalists actively participating.
“A lot of things have been done right by Amitabh over the past four years – cleaning up the balance sheet, granularising the balance sheet, shutting down and restructuring international businesses, beefing up underwriting standards and provisioning,” said Suresh Ganapathy of Macquarie Capital.
Macquarie believes that with Axis Bank acquiring a significant stake in Max Life Insurance, there could be more involvement at the board level by the bank. Axis Bank has increased its stake in Max Life Insurance to 19% from 13% last month.
Macquarie values Axis Bank on a sustainable return on assets (ROA) of 1.7%. Axis Bank reported 1.8% ROA for FY23 on the back of 4% net interest margin, 40 bps credit costs and cost to assets of 2.2%.
