A stock and gold fund from UTI Asset Management has collected about Rs 300 crore, Chief Marketing Officer Jaideep Bhattacharya said on Monday. The amount is nearly equal to the total assets mopped up by nine new funds from eight fund houses since August, surprising industry watchers.
The firm is still collating data but Bhattacharya said the figure was on its way to cross the 3-billion-rupee-mark from more than 100,000 investors. This is in contrast to the industry trend where monthly flows fell to a four-year low in October, dragged down by a 50 percent fall in the benchmark index this year.
New funds in October collected just 390 million rupees, data from the Association of Mutual Funds of India (AMFI) showed. "It's definitely better than what many people would have expected, may be better than what UTI themselves would have expected," said Krishnan Sitaraman, head of fund services and fixed income research at CRISIL.
UTI's large distribution network and the fund's objective of combining stock and gold investments would have appealed to a large section of the population, Sitaraman added. The fund used services of 5,000 'Dabbawalas,' a chain of Six Sigma certified workers who collect and deliver cooked food to Mumbai's office workers, as well as internet, mobile, cable TV advertising to attract investors, Bhattacharya said. This led advertising costs to fall 80 percent.
The firm is still collating data but Bhattacharya said the figure was on its way to cross the 3-billion-rupee-mark from more than 100,000 investors. This is in contrast to the industry trend where monthly flows fell to a four-year low in October, dragged down by a 50 percent fall in the benchmark index this year.
New funds in October collected just 390 million rupees, data from the Association of Mutual Funds of India (AMFI) showed. "It's definitely better than what many people would have expected, may be better than what UTI themselves would have expected," said Krishnan Sitaraman, head of fund services and fixed income research at CRISIL.
UTI's large distribution network and the fund's objective of combining stock and gold investments would have appealed to a large section of the population, Sitaraman added. The fund used services of 5,000 'Dabbawalas,' a chain of Six Sigma certified workers who collect and deliver cooked food to Mumbai's office workers, as well as internet, mobile, cable TV advertising to attract investors, Bhattacharya said. This led advertising costs to fall 80 percent.
