Indian mortgage lender Dewan Housing Finance Corp Ltd plans to raise $100 million for a private equity fund by June-end, a top official said on Monday.
The money is part of the $250 million the company plans to raise for the private equity fund by March 2009, Vice-Chairman and Managing Director Kapil Wadhawan said.
Initial investors for the fund would be from the Middle East and the UK and more than half the corpus would be allocated towards real estate projects in Tier-II and Tier-III cities, he said.
It had earlier raised 1 billion rupees for another private equity fund and the entire corpus has been invested in various real estate projects, Wadhawan said.
DIVIDEND BOOST
It has earned a dividend income of 170 million rupees from its investments through the private equity fund, which contributed significantly to the net profit, he said.
Dewan Housing posted a 118 percent jump in net profit for Jan-March at 294.4 million rupees from a year earlier, while total income grew 45 percent to 1.48 billion rupees.
“We have also been able to maintain our margins at three percent,” he said.
Dewan Housing, which mainly lends for medium and low-income dwellings, is looking at a 25 percent growth in loan disbursement for the next few years, Wadhawan said.
It disbursed 17.61 billion rupees during 2007/08. The company's total consolidated asset base was 47.31 billion rupees.
Source: Reuters