Pru Icici Mops Up The Maximum

Prudential ICICI Mutual Fund, India's largest private sector mutual fund house, garnered over 19 per cent of the corpus of the top 18 private fund houses in 2001. Its share as on end-November 2001 stood at Rs 6,499 crore, out of the aggregate corpus of Rs 34,461 crore.

Prudential ICICI registered a 42 per cent jump in its corpus as compared with Rs 4560 crore at the end of the previous calendar year.

Prudential ICICI Mutual Fund's portfolio is distributed in 18 schemes -- four equity oriented, one balanced and 13 debt oriented schemes. The largest chunk (88 per cent) of the corpus is concentrated in debt oriented schemes, while the four equity oriented schemes account for nine per cent and the sole balanced scheme accounts for three per cent of the corpus.

The corpus of the 18 fund houses together has been heavily weighted in favour of debt oriented schemes -- accounting for 77 per cent of the pie. The balanced schemes contributed 11 per cent, while equity schemes accounted for 13 per cent of the aggregate corpus.

Interestingly, though equity oriented schemes shared 13 per cent of total corpus, the number of such schemes stands at 61 -- there are 84 debt oriented schemes. The 18 fund houses had 21 balanced schemes.

One of the major factors that could be attributed for the low share of equity oriented schemes in the total corpus is the hefty erosion in equity investments during the year.

Birla Sunlife Mutual Fund was the second largest private sector mutual fund house with a corpus of Rs 4,122 crore, while HDFC Mutual Fund notched the third rank with a corpus of Rs 4,011 crore.

Pioneer ITI, with the largest number of investors, accounted for 9.1 per cent of the private sector mutual funds corpus. The fund house's corpus stood at Rs 3,142 crore at the end of November 2001.