Shareholder Value Creation in the Indian Banking Industry: An EVA Analysis

Economic Value Added (EVA) has received a lot of recognition as a measure of shareholder value creation. While the measure has been widely used for the purpose all over the world, many research studies have appeared to examine variety of issues related to EVA. An attempt has been made in this paper to revisit EVA-based analysis for the Indian Banking Industry. A Sample of 14 public sector and 12 private sector banks listed in Bombay Stock Exchange has been selected. The financial data of these sample units for four years, viz., 2003-04 to 2006-07, have been used for the analysis and comparison. Equity approach has been followed to compute EVA. Average EVA for all public sector banks under study for the whole period of analysis was found to be Rs. 774.57 cr. The corresponding figure for the private sector banks was Rs. 393.47 cr. This finding contradicts with that of some earlier researches (Parsuraman, 2000; and Thamy et al., 2000), which concluded that Indian banks do not create any value for their shareholders. The difference between the mean values of EVA for public sector and private sector banks, however, was not found significant (value of ‘t’ 0.0096 < 2.06). Among public sector banks, State Bank of India (SBI) ranked the highest in terms of average EVA (Rs. 6193.24 cr), while Canara Bank was the only one with negative average EVA (Rs. 1390.20 cr). ICICI Bank Ltd. stood highest among private sector banks with regard to average EVA (Rs. 2036.12 cr), while no bank in this category had negative average EVA for the entire period of the study. Correlation analysis of EVA with other related figure was another objective of the present research and Karl Pearson’s coefficients of correlation were determined and analyzed in the paper.