Mumbai: State-run Central Bank of India requires Rs 3,000 crore capital this year and plans to raise the same from the government and through the qualified institutional placement route.
"Our capital requirement this financial year is Rs 3,000 crore. From the government we are expecting Rs 1,500 crore and the rest would be from internal accruals and may be will be go to the market," chairman and managing director Rajeev Rishi said.
Last week, the government had said public sector banks would need to raise Rs 1.10 lakh crore from markets to meet more than half of their capital requirement of Rs 1.80 lakh crore over the next four years to meet the Basel III capital adequacy norms.
Of this Rs 1.80 lakh crore fresh growth capital, the government said it would provide Rs 70,000 crore over a period of four years out of which they will be getting Rs 25,000 crore in 2015-16 and a similar amount in next financial year.
Banks would have to raise the balance amount from the markets, the ministry had said.
Rishi said the bank would rather go for a QIP route to meet its capital requirement. "Basically, we don't want to go in for the follow-on public offer. We will be going for a QIP instead," Rishi said.
The bank has already appointed three merchant bankers - SBI Capital Markets, IDBI Capital and ICICI Securities--for the QIP.
Asked about the timing, he said, "we are trying to see how the next two quarters pan out and then we will decide."
Executive director BK Divakara said though rise in NPA level during the first quarter is likely to affect the timing of the QIP issue, it will be done this fiscal year itself.
"We never expected that our NPAs will go up so much in Q1. We were expecting that it would be contained more or less at same level or marginally will go up. It was a set back for us. Due to rise in NPA we are not sure what would be a response for our QIP. We will again be meeting merchant bankers and take their views," he said.
In June quarter, its gross bad loans rose to 6.70 per cent from 6.15 percent, while net NPAs too jumped to 4 percent from 3.62 percent. Fresh slippages in the quarter stood at Rs 1,869 crore.
"NPAs are contingent to many factors. We did hope that the environment will improve but we still see stresses in certain segments like steel, power, infra. We have already seen a majority of these accounts slip into NPAs. So, residual pipeline would not be that bad. I see NPA level at round 6 per cent by March," Rishi said after the announcement of Q1 numbers."
