Today, the Reserve Bank released the data on performance of the private corporate business sector during the second quarter of 2025-26, drawn from abridged quarterly financial results of 3,118 listed non-government non-financial companies. This summary position also includes comparable data for Q1:2025-26 and Q2:2024-25 to enable study of sequential (q-o-q) and annual (y-o-y) change (web-link https://data.rbi.org.in/DBIE/#/dbie/reports/Statistics/Corporate%20Sector/Listed%20Non-Government%20Non-Financial%20Companies).

Highlights    

Sales

• Sales growth of listed private non-financial companies improved to 8.0 per cent (y-o-y) during Q2:2025-26 from 5.5 per cent growth in the previous quarter (5.4 per cent in Q2:2024-25), led by improvement in sales growth across all the major sectors (Table 1A).

• Sales of 1,775 listed private manufacturing companies rose by 8.5 per cent (y-o-y) during Q2:2025-26 as compared to 5.3 per cent in the previous quarter, mainly driven by higher sales growth in automobiles, food products, electrical machinery and chemicals industries (Table 2A and 5A, Chart 1).

• Information Technology (IT) companies recorded a rise of 7.8 per cent (y-o-y) in their sales during Q2:2025-26 from 6.0 per cent in the previous quarter.

• Sales of non-IT services companies recorded a double-digit growth of 10.6 per cent in Q2:2025-26 as compared to 7.5 per cent growth in the previous quarter, primarily due to higher sales growth recorded by the wholesale and retail trade companies.

Expenditure

• Manufacturing companies’ expenses on raw material rose by 9.0 per cent (y-o-y) during Q2:2025-26 in consonance with their sales growth; raw material to sales ratio increased to 55.9 per cent during Q2 from 54.1 per cent in the previous quarter (Table 2A and 2B).

• Staff cost of manufacturing, IT and non-IT services companies rose by 9.2 per cent, 6.0 per cent and 8.9 per cent, respectively, during Q2:2025-26, higher than the growth recorded during the previous quarter. Staff cost to sales ratio for manufacturing and non-IT services companies, broadly remained stable at 5.8 per cent and 10.7 per cent, respectively, during Q2:2025-26, while for IT companies, the ratio moderated to 47.3 per cent in Q2 from 48.8 per cent in the previous quarter.

Pricing power

• Operating profit growth (y-o-y) of manufacturing and IT companies improved to 10.6 per cent and 7.7 per cent, respectively, while it moderated to 6.5 per cent for non-IT services companies during Q2 from the previous quarter (Table 2A).

• Operating profit margin improved sequentially for IT companies during Q2:2025-26, while it moderated for manufacturing and non-IT services rector (Table 2B and Chart 2).

Interest expenses

• With the sequential decline in profit, manufacturing companies’ interest coverage ratio (ICR)¹ moderated to 8.6 in Q2:2025-26. Within services sector, while ICR of non-IT services companies broadly remained stable, ICR of IT firms continued to remain at elevated level during Q2:2025-26 (Table 2B).

List of Tables

Notes:

• The coverage of companies in different quarters varies, depending on the date of declaration of results; this is, however, not expected to significantly alter the aggregate position.

• Explanatory notes detailing the compilation methodology, and the glossary (including revised definitions and calculations that differ from previous releases) are appended.

(Brij Raj)               
Chief General Manager

Press Release: 2025-2026/1560

¹ICR (i.e., ratio of earnings before interest and tax to interest expenses) is a measure of debt servicing capacity of a company. The minimum value for ICR is 1 for a company to be viable.