'Size Matters' for Sundaram BNP Paribas Mutual Fund:

Sundaram BNP Paribas Mutual Fund recently launched a unique offering of PSU opportunity fund where the investors’ money would be invested only in the PSU companies. Considering that presently the only option investors have is of equity, debt and commodity funds, this can be thought of as an innovation.

As an asset class, PSUs have dominant share in four sectors, energy, financials, utilities and materials. PSUs have backing of the government and India being a developing nation where infrastructure is going to be the key growth drivers especially with so much of fiscal action happening, PSUs are going to grow exponentially. The market cap of the PSU universe has risen from about Rs. 90000 crore to Rs. 15,10,254 crore in this decade as PSU stocks outpaced the broad markets as well as private sector players. Thus investing in this class of assets is sure to give handsome returns with minimum risk.

Now getting to the advertising aspect followed by Sundaram BNP Paribas Mutual Fund i.e. a print ad in one of the dailies in Mumbai last week. They are selling the might of its multinational giant BNP Paribas which is a mammoth organization. The print ad headline being ‘size matters’. Of course size matters and with deep pockets of BNP Paribas, it surely matters more. But I find a small lacuna in this strategy because of the implantation of the print ad. It shows a sumo wrestler with this ‘size matters’ headline.

A small mutual fund can bring out a similar ad with a small sumo wrestler vs. a big sumo wrestler as shown in the picture above. This is possible in sumo wrestling since agility matters and not the size. Thus a small company can write ‘size doesn’t matter’ in the ad and publish it. It could be quite a coup of sorts.

Cola wars and technology wars (between Apple and Microsoft) are known but mutual fund wars would be quite interesting. Isn’t it?