Rating: HOLD; RBL Bank: Aggressive retail growth plans We recently met with RBL Bank’s MD and CEO, Subramania Kumar, and Executive director, Rajeev Ahuja, to discuss the bank’s newly unveiled strategy for the FY23-FY26. Since the appointment of the new MD&CEO, RBL has made significant changes in its senior management team, hiring six talented individuals externally and promoting 21 internally over the past year. The bank has also enhanced its compliance measures and sharpened its focus. RBL Bank reconfirmed its guidance of achieving a CAGR of over 20% in loans from FY23-FY26, primarily driven by the retail segment. While continuing to prioritise card services, microfinance (MFI), and commercial banking, RBL Bank aims to aggressively expand its recently launched retail products, including housing loans, vehicle loans, gold loans, and small business loans. The bank intends to target tier-2 and tier-3 locations, where there is substantial untapped demand for these secured loan products. These businesses offer higher yields and require relatively less capital. To support its growth objectives, RBL Bank plans to increase its branch network from the current count of approximately 517 branches to 800 branches within the next three years. Additionally, the bank aims to leverage its business correspondent (BC) points for lead generation, further facilitating its expansion efforts. RBL has already invested significantly into its asset platform, systems, processes, technology and feet-on-street. It thus believes a large part of fixed costs have already been incurred and that incremental costs would be volume-led. Management sounded confident of improving the sourcing of incremental business from branches vs DSAs/connectors from a ratio of 20:80 currently to 50:50 by FY24 led by improving productivity and technology stack. RBL reiterated its guidance of revenue growth exceeding opex growth and thus improving RoA by 10-20bps every year through FY23-FY26. RBL has tier-1 capital at 15.3% and believes the current levels are sufficient for the next 18-24 months. We believe RBL’s strategy to grow exponentially in secured retail products (housing, wheels, SBL, gold) is reasonably scalable, NIM-accretive and less risky though it is more cost-intensive. We build-in a loan CAGR of 15% during FY23-FY25E, which is lower than the management guidance (of 20%), due to our view of moderation in systemic credit growth and higher competitive intensity. Leadership gaps being almost filled by promoting internal talent: Under the leadership of new MD&CEO since Jun’22, RBL has filled almost every senior management role (hired 6 talents laterally and elevated 21 internally) in the past 12 months. Notable changes are Chief information officer (Ravi Pichan), Head of Corporate centre (Alok Rastogi) and has elevated Vijay Anandh as head of Retail Assets and Collections. The bank has finalised the person for CFO and Wheels head. Also read: SEBI bans IIFL Securities from signing new broking clients for 2 years RBL reiterated its FY23-FY26 strategy with >20% CAGR in loans and deposits with sharp focus on granularity. It plans to build on the existing core businesses (credit card, MFI, Commercial) and expects exponential rise in the share of new businesses (housing, gold, small business and wheels). Overall, the bank targets 10-20bps per annum rise in RoA and 100-150bps rise in RoE for the FY24-FY26 period. Retail segment is likely to be the key driver for growth. The bank expects the share of Retail business to rise to 60-65% by FY26 vs 54% now. While retaining focus on cards, MFI and commercial banking, RBL intends to aggressively grow its newly launched retail products (housing, wheels, gold, and small business loans), predominantly in tier-2 and tier-3 locations.
Retail inflation in milk was reported at 8.85% in May 2023. The milk inflation has remained elevated at over 6% since August 2022. Despite India being the largest milk producer since 1998, the commodity has been the second biggest factor after cereals such as rice and wheat in driving up retail inflation in the last fiscal.
Milk has the second highest weight in the food and beverages basket of the consumer price index at 6.61%, a notch lower than cereals and products with a 9.67% weight. Organised players, including Mother Dairy and Amul, hiked prices multiple times in the last one year citing higher fodder cost, robust demand and some impact due to reports of lumpy skin disease.
Industry sources said feed cost, which has a share of more than 65% in the cost of production of milk, has increased to Rs 20/kg from Rs 8 a year ago. The finance ministry in April had attributed the elevated milk inflation to a demand supply mismatch and said it could be one of the factors apart from volatile international crude oil prices and constrained supplies of milk would influence the country’s inflation trajectory.
“Milk production has been impacted by a lumpy skin disease infecting millions of cattle in late 2022,” the ministry said in the monthly economic review, adding that the vaccination drive against the disease is expected to curb the spread and immune the cattle against the skin disease.
According to official data, currently India is the world’s largest milk producer, and has a share of 23% in global milk production. For the first time in decades, the country’s milk production is likely to have stagnated in 2022-23 due to Lumpy Skin Disease in cattle across several states and the lagged effect of Covid-19 in the form of stunting of the animals, a senior official with department of animal husbandry and dairying recently had stated. The milk production was estimated at 221 million tonne in 2021-22.