PNB Housing Finance aiming to grow affordable housing book to ₹4,000 crore by end March 2025, says MD and CEO Girish Kousgi

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PNB Housing Finance Ltd (PNBHFL) is looking to grow its retail book by 17 per cent this fiscal, its MD and CEO Girish Kousgi has said. The company closed the financial year 2023-24 with the retail book of ₹63,000 crore. Last fiscal year the growth rate of retail books was 14 per cent. 

On an overall basis, PNBHFL has assets under management of ₹65,000 crore including ₹2,000 crore related to corporate lending. 

PNBHFL is also aiming to ramp up its affordable housing book (home loan product is called Roshini) to ₹4,000 crore by the end March 2025 as against end March 2024 level of ₹1,800 crore, Kousgi told businessline in an interview.

He also said that PNBHFL would this fiscal set up 50 new branches, taking the overall count of its branch network to 350.

PNBHFL started an affordable housing business about 15 months back. This year the company has started a new vertical ‘emerging’. The company will be present in the three  verticals — prime, emerging and affordable. 

The big story

“Big story this year from our side will be moving to high yielding segment. The second big story will be ramping up on the affordable book and third big story is going to be our focus on emerging vertical that we started this year”, Kousgi said.

“The idea this year is to scale up affordable, then emerging and then prime. This will be order of priority.”

While the prime segment delivers a yield of 9.5 per cent, the yield in the case of the ‘emerging’ segment is 10.25-10.3 per cent and for affordable segment the yield is about 12.6 per cent, Kousgi noted.

Earlier the company was focusing on super prime and prime verticals. However last year PNBHFL moved out of super prime.

On asset quality, Kousgi said that gross NPA as a percentage of advances as of the end of March 2024 stood at 1.5 per cent and the aim is to bring it to 1.1 per cent by the end of March 2025. The net NPA of the company is already below 1 per cent.

PNBHFL had reported a 57.27 per cent increase in consolidated net profit for the quarter ended March 31, 2024 at ₹439.25 crore (₹279.28 crore). In the December 2023 quarter, consolidated net profit stood at ₹338.44 crore.

For the entire fiscal 2023-24, PNBHFL has recorded a 44 per cent increase in consolidated net profit at ₹1,508.01 crore (₹1,046 crore).