Franklin Templeton India President Mehrotra: Size, evidently, does matter

It's hard to ignore the Templeton India Growth Fund when discussing the country's largest fund house. After all, it was with this scheme-launched under the guidance of emerging markets guru Mark Mobius-that Templeton began its campaign in India. Then, there's the thing about this probably being the only fund based on the 'value-investing' model. For the record, the fund itself has been an outperformer, but it is the fund house in which we are interested. Since 1996, Templeton has grown the funds under management from a measly Rs 50 crore to a staggering Rs 15,187 crore. And all of the 40 fund schemes the company offers boasted positive returns for the year ended March 31, 2004: seven of the 10 open ended equity schemes on offer registered returns higher than the Sensex's 83 per cent in the same period; and most of its open ended debt funds outperformed their respective bench marks-CRISIL bond fund index (8.83 per cent), IBEX (14.16 per cent) for gilt funds, and CRISIL liquid fund index (4.35 per cent)."We take the bottom-up approach," says the company's Chief Investment Officer Sukumar Rajah explaining the reason for its performance. "We look at individual stocks and their potential for long-term capital appreciation, and place an emphasis on in-house research."

Size helps, and Templeton's presence in this column probably has a lot to do with the company's 2002 acquisition of Pioneer ITI, which helped it increase the quantum of funds under management from Rs 4,400 crore to Rs 8,200 crore overnight. "At Franklin Templeton, our focus has always been on building a financial institution that will be a leader in all aspects (performance, service, transparency) in the domestic mutual fund industry," says Ravi Mehrotra, President, Franklin Templeton India. Well, size is something the California-based parent, Franklin Templeton Investments is used to: it manages $350 billion.