Shares of LIC Housing Finance slumped nearly 7 percent on Monday after the company posted lower-than-expected quarterly earnings.

Vinay Sah, MD and CEO spoke to CNBC-TV18 about the results and company's outlook.

“We are targeting higher growth rates and we expect that with the pickup in the realty sector, the growth rate should go up,” said Sah.

“Last year our growth rates for the fiscal year 2017-2018 were in the range of 18-19 percent. Because the loan book base is very high, we would try to reach that number but it should be more than 15 percent by maybe a couple of percentages,” he added.

“Loan book growth rate is also helped by whatever prepayments we are able to stop. We have also done a lot of work on re-writing of the cases whereby there is some sort of exit can happen and because these rewriting was more than last year, prepayments were less than last year so that has also contributed to better growth rate in the loan book,” said Sah.

Speaking about the margins, Sah said, “We are working very hard on increasing our total income. Once that gets onto a higher growth trajectory probably net interest margins (NIMs) will also improve. Q1 traditionally is less than Q4.”