• Bajaj Finserv's third quarter earnings were boosted by strong two-wheeler sales because of the festive season, the company's Managing Director, Sanjiv Bajaj tells CNBC-TV18. Going forward, the company plans to finance products on e-commerce websites, he said.
• Is the worst over?: I don’t know if the worst is over but at least what we are seeing right now for say the last quarter is not worse than earlier. There is clearly a lot of hope on the ground. When we look at our different segments, we are seeing growth picking up in the SME segment. On the consumer side, you see the overall growth, for example, consumer durable sales has not been great but it has not been great for the last couple of years in the country. However, yes you talk of green shoots, if you see in the last quarter, there is noise now or some amount of movement on the ground but I would wait a couple of quarters to see if we really get to see strong or even medium strong but steady numbers of higher growth.
• Growth in Q4? We have always said that 20-25 % growth is a sustainable growth for Bajaj Finance when you look at, at least the next couple of years; we can’t project beyond that but there are always periods when you end up doing significantly better.
• Growth rate in the 2 wheeler and rural markets? Our two wheeler is the only line which is still captive where we finance only Bajaj owned products. We have seen some amount of growth over there, partly because of again the festival season that we saw last quarter but we have to see some stable growth coming through. Far more important on rural is we are now in overall 300 rural towns and villages through a hub and spoke model and this is growing well. We see again significant demand for gold financing, for consumer durable financing, refinancing of second hand vehicles, we have started doing some amount of –SUV financing there and while in general we all hear about the rural economy being slow but again because it is a new line for us we have been able to grow pretty well over there.
• Alliance with the Flipkart’s and the Snapdeal’s? If you see, we are currently doing resale financing with bunch of the major guys including Flipkart and Snapdeal that you talked about. The next step of this is to end up offering EMI finance to consumers. We are speaking with some of the big boys there and I hope by April we will at least have this service available with one of them. What it ends up doing is, it ends up further expanding for them the sources of funds available for people to go and buy stuff. So, this is something that we are focusing on now.
• Consumer loan growth for the industry?: As far as the industry is concerned, when we are talking of loan growth, we today end up accounting for more most of the industry as far a s consumer lending is concerned. These are products that are less than USD 600-700 in terms of loan ticket size. Banks find it expensive to do this. I think we would be in the region of 35-45 %. I would again say 45 % steady growth rate, next couple of years but looking at everything that we are seeing around us, as the economy should start picking up and we should start seeing this maybe in two quarters or so, hopefully earlier then this number should move further up.
India
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