Ratish Varier

Sundaram AM is an active, research-oriented manager which employs a fundamental approach, seeking long-term outperformance by investing in large and small/medium-sized companies with unique business strength in attractive sectors, sound and transparent management, visibility and durable growth at a reasonable price. The firm performs fundamental quantitative analysis, including regular company visits, to assess markets, seeking to identify attractive and relatively unknown companies with strong financial characteristics evaluating profit margins, finance charges, cash flows, revenue and earnings growth, value add, return on equity and Du-Pont analysis, return on capital employed, working capital efficiency, trend analysis for key parameters and peer and industry aggregate comparison. To generate ideas, they look at a variety of macroeconomic factors including GDP, inflation, interest rates, money supply, credit growth, forex accretion mapping sector patterns in GDP growth, and the economic cycle. The company-specific factors they evaluate include future growth drivers, management capability, capital intensity and balance sheet strength. Sundaram constructs portfolios utilizing a core/satellite approach, where the core portfolio contains a significant percentage of large-caps and the satellite portfolio is based on small/mid-caps. They qualitatively evaluate business/sector prospects and the product lifecycle/business cycle. They look at a company's risk profile, including their leverage, ability to raise equity, cost of capital, track record in debt repayment, qualitative aspects, transparency, management quality and capability and fairness in treatment of minority shareholders.

IndusInd Nippon is an active, prudent manager which seeks consistent, superior long-term returns with a well-defined and disciplined investment approach. They perform macro analysis of the economy by tracking the trends in key economic indicators and analyze market dynamics to determine their view of the changes likely in the interest rate scenario and equity market movements. The firm monitors the price movements at all times along with factors that affect them such as prevailing market sentiment, cash flows in the market and views/actions of key market participants. To analyze the debt markets, yield curve movements and changes in its shape are also studied.

MMIMPL builds continuously evolving in-house process models for equity and debt portfolios. Selection of securities in portfolios is guided by GCMV Process, which evaluates companies based on growth estimates, cash flow analysis, management and valuations. For debt securities, the firm follows the Risk Guard Process for credit assessment and monitoring and goes beyond the conventional analysis of business, management and financial qualities.