Recovering lost ground

Strong shareholder support and a commitment from our sponsors, Canara Bank and Robeco, towards building a long-term business in India continue to be our biggest strengths. Canara Bank's vast distribution footprint and brand recall in India and Robeco's investment experience of over 85 years worldwide are definite advantages for our AMC business in India. At Canara Robeco, the joint venture has successfully built a profitable business, with long-term assets, based on right selling practices and high quality investment and risk-management processes.

In terms of weaknesses we feel that the joint venture came into existence towards 2007, making us sort of a late entrant into the open-ended product era of the Indian mutual fund industry. We believe our strong performance across product categories, robust processes and, above all, a strong commitment to Indian markets will help us recover lost ground quickly.

Challenges ahead

The big challenge for the mutual industry industry continues to be lower penetration amongst Indian investors due to low awareness of the performance of market-based financial products. A waning interest amongst financial intermediaries towards mutual fund distribution (vis-a-vis other products), coupled with increased complexity of the regulatory environment, also emerges as a critical factor. Short investment horizons of most mutual fund investors, low exposure of domestic retirement/pension corpuses to equity markets and low interest in/availability of optimal defined-contribution constructs pose a challenge from the investment perspective.

We anticipate fantastic years ahead from the perspective of Indian investors looking to create long-term wealth, both in equities and fixed-income portfolios of India-domiciled products. We strongly believe that India is in the 'sweetest of sweet spots' in terms of relative investment options globally, and while volatility will persist in the years ahead, buying at dips or STP/SIP will continue to generate outperformance for the investors in Indian markets.

Competition

It's a free market - people will enter wherever they see sustainable and profitable opportunities. Also, in terms of product range, Indian investors can certainly benefit from the experience of some of the successful constructs from overseas markets with a view to portfolio diversification as also continually improving investment solutions.

Retail reach

We are strongly committed to building long-term retail presence in India. We regularly monitor parameters like number of new clients added, folios, our business growth in the area of retail constructs like SIPs, growth of assets in upcountry/B15 locations, expansion of distribution reach, etc. We have made good progress on most of these parameters, given the large retail footprint of our sponsor Canara Bank and the strong expertise of Robeco in the areas of investment management, product construct and risk management.