Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Canara Robeco Eyes 3% Fund Market Share By 2010

Mumbai: Canara Robeco Mutual Fund sees the Indian fund industry tripling assets to Rs 15 trillion in the next five years and expects to corner a 3 per cent market share by 2010, up from 0.5 per cent now, a senior executive said on Monday.

Sanjay Santhanam, director, sales and marketing, said his firm was investing in its brand and workforce and planned to offer three new funds, including a global fund this year, to attract retail investors who might keep raising exposure to mutual funds.

The fund house, a joint venture between Canara Bank and Dutch fund giant Robeco, part of privately-held Rabobank Group, managed about Rs 2700 crore in the Rs 5.5 trillion domestic fund industry at end-December.

"We hope that in three years time it will grow to something like 25,000 crores," Santhanam, who joined recently from Sundaram BNP Paribas Asset Management, told Reuters in an interview.

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"In the past, we were not very visible to the distributors because we were smaller in terms of our sales team...we are making that change."

He said the sales team would expand to 75-80 people by end of this year from 23 when Robeco bought a 49 per cent stake in the fund arm of state-run Canara Bank in March last year.

The firm is hunting for a chief investment officer, whom it expects to hire by the start of next fiscal year, and triple headcount in the investment management team to 15 people.

He said the firm would be present at 30 centres by end-2008 up from 21 now, have better online presence and use public sector banks for distribution to attract retail investors whom it saw making only 40 per cent of the industry but key to future growth.

The industry, which attracted global asset managers such as American International Group Inc and JPMorgan last year, has seen its assets under management surge nearly four-and-a-half times to $140 billion in the last five years.

A 43 per cent annual rise in the key BSE index in the past five calendar years has lured droves of investors to funds, which gobbled up 4.8 per cent of household savings in 2006/07, from 0.4 per cent two years earlier, central bank data showed.

"Gross financial savings are going up at a frenetic pace, rising 21 per cent per year in the last five years. That itself is going to ensure that even if the percentage remains the same you have at least 20 per cent (industry) growth," he said.

Investors would keep shifting money away from small-savings and government securities to mutual funds, Santhanam said, adding new alternative offerings such as real estate, commodities and structured products would contribute to the industry's growth.

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