BENGALURU (Reuters) – Indian stockbroker Angel One reported a nearly 43% rise in second-quarter profit on Thursday, propelled by surging orders, breaking a four-quarter streak of slowing growth.
Consolidated profit rose to 3.05 billion rupees ($36.65 million) in the quarter ended September 2023 from 2.14 billion rupees a year earlier.
Profit growth had earlier slowed to 30.4% in the March quarter and to 21.7% in the June quarter.
India’s main stock exchange in July imposed a monetary penalty of 16.7 million rupees on the stockbroker and prohibited it from onboarding new ‘authorised persons’ – or agents – for six months, alleging a failure to monitor the operations of existing ones.
However, Angel One said the prohibition did not affect its client acquisition, which rose nearly 80% during the quarter, while the total number of orders advanced more than 36%.
Total revenue from operations for the company, which offers various trading apps, climbed nearly 41% to 10.48 billion rupees.
The company pointed to a renewed focus on new features and enhanced client onboarding processes helping ramp up client additions.
Angel One held a 13.2% share in the number of demat accounts in India in the Sept. quarter, up from 11.3% last year.
Traditional stockbrokers such as Angel One are in the midst of a strategic shift towards spending more on technology and new price packages as they compete with startup brokers such as Zerodha, Groww and Upstox, which draw users with discounted offerings and easy-to-use smartphone apps, analysts say.
The entry of Walmart-owned Indian payments firm PhonePe into online stockbroking with its platform Share.Market also added heat to the competition in this space.
Shares of the company closed 0.22% higher ahead of results. They rose nearly 8% during the September quarter, compared with a 2.3% rise in the benchmark Nifty 50 index.
($1 = 83.2167 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Kashish Tandon and Navamya Ganesh Acharya in Bengaluru; Editing by Janane Venkatraman)