In this series, Investment Week speaks to some of the winners of the Fund Manager of the Year Awards 2020 about their teams, how they construct portfolios, performance drivers and how their particular strategies may develop in the future.
Where do you see the big opportunities for investors in India in the years ahead?
The Indian government's structural reform measures including labor reform, improving ease of doing business, GST simplification and fiscal reforms will strengthen the framework to focus on the 'Make in India' campaign.
In the medium term, with realignment in global manufacturing and development of sourcing bases outside of China, India could potentially benefit.
Driven by superior demographics, a rising middle-class, low household debt and under-penetration, India's consumption theme is one of the exciting growth stories in Asia.
In coming years, with rising income and awareness, we believe the Indian consumption basket would shift away from basic sustenance items such as food to more discretionary consumption items such as consumer durables, jewelry and autos. This is set to benefit leaders we own in these nascent categories.
Outside consumption, infrastructure development and housing is a multi-decade opportunity. Government's steps to invite private sector for development and ownership of infrastructure assets such as railroads, highways and airports should provide much needed long-term capital and ensure timely completion of projects.
Meanwhile, huge unmet demand, government initiatives to boost housing, will drive construction activity, economic activities as well as job creation.
This in turn will benefit financial companies, cement, paints as well as consumer durables.
Covid-19 has provided a significant thrust to digitisation with adoption rates of the coming 3-4 years being achieved in the past 4-5 months. Omni-channel presence and big data analytics have become imperative for any company that is to be relevant for the next decade.
This is a significant tailwind for Indian software companies, which until now were suffering from plateauing growth from legacy clients.
From a pure play opportunity on digitisation, we have a significant exposure in Reliance Industries, an Indian super app with leadership in offline retail and telecoms, and a clear path towards capturing higher consumer wallets through cross-selling and big data analytics in coming years.
