Ujjivan’s Press Statement on CRISIL ratings downgrade on 31-12-10

Bengaluru: We take strong objection to and completely disagree with CRISIL’s decision to downgrade Ujjivan’s rating in a general, across-the-board move with four other MFIs, without any evaluation of individual organisational merits and demerits.

CRISIL’s action does not reflect a case to case basis analysis of each MFI based on their strengths of operations and liquidity in spite of the current situation for MFI’s.

Ujjivan had a bank rating in October 2010 from CARE for Rs.310.63 Crores (rated BBB), which is the latest loan rating for Ujjivan. This supersedes the previous year term borrowing rating by CRISIL in August 2009 for Rs.111 Crores (which was rated BBB–).

1. Ujjivan operates in twenty states & union territories and has no operations or loan exposure in Andhra Pradesh. Our loan portfolio has continued to improve even during this industry crisis. Our cumulative repayment rate improved from 99% to 99.12% in November 2010.

2. We have consistently met all loan servicing requirements to all our lenders on or before due date.

3. We have continued to receive fresh funding from institutions both in India and overseas post-Andhra Ordinance and are not affected by the current liquidity crisis.

4. The contention that the Reserve Bank of India and Ministry of Finance have not been supportive of the microfinance industry especially those not operating in Andhra during this crisis, is totally inconsistent with reality. We would like to refer CRISIL to the RBI press release on this matter on 22-12-10 and a number of announcements from Ministry of Finance officials including the Finance Minister in the last one month.


Ujjivan continues to enjoy strong business operations across twenty states in India, excellent portfolio quality, and more than sufficient liquidity to meet all our contractual loan servicing requirements. Under these circumstances to be generalised and categorised together with other MFIs and downgraded is unwarranted and without merit.

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14th Jan 2011: CRISIL removes 9 MFIs (including Ujjivan) from Negative Watch list