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Parul Monga & Pratibha Rathore
Mumbai, Mar 24: The Unit Trust of India's (UTI) first off-shore IT sector specific fund -- the India Information Technology Fund -- has mobilised around $ 50 million in the last fortnight. The trust has set a target of mobilising around $ 75 million in the scheme.
``But, according to the initial response to the road-shows the scheme can mop-up another $ 50 million which is expected, and this would take the total mobilisation in the scheme to $ 100 million,'' said a top UTI source. This is for the first time that the country's biggest mutual fund has tapped the offshore market again for garnering funds into this scheme. Launched in July 1997, the `India IT Fund' is a close-ended five-year information technology sector specific scheme.
According to top UTI sources, the road-shows for the scheme are already on for the past two weeks which will get over shortly. Credit Lyonnais Asia Securities Ltd (CLSA) is the underwriter to the scheme, but this could not be confirmed.
In the month of October 1998 UTI hadshown an inclination to raise fresh subscriptions for the IT sector specific off-shore fund. "The move follows a spectacular performance by this $ 50 million Mauritius-based India IT fund", the UTI officials had said then. The UTI IT fund has seen its corpus double since inception (in July 1997) to Rs 563 crore, in the month of March 1999. This fund is listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and is among the top performing off-shore schemes.
The net asset value (NAV) of the fund has risen by an enormous 108.60 per cent in rupee terms as on December 31, 1998, while in dollar terms the NAV of has risen by 61.20 per cent, according to the data available as on March 31, 1998. ``The NAV has gone up much faster since then as the information technology stocks have seen their share prices rise much faster in the last one year'', said the UTI source. The fund which was launched as a close-ended sector specific fund was earlier slated to invest in telecommunication and engineering sector in addition to theinformation technology stocks. Initially, a large portion of the corpus was invested in the stocks of these companies but eventually the holdings in telecom and engineering were liquidated and the money put into information technology stocks.
The telecom and engineering stocks now form only 5 per cent of the current corpus of the scheme. The top 10 holdings of the scheme are Infosys, NIIT, Aptech, Satyam Computers, Tata Infotech, Wipro, Digital Equipment, BFL Software, Pentafour Software and Mastek.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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