Industry Trends

Which fund house is the 2017 growth champion?

The WF Mirror Report 2017

Vijay Venkatram, Managing Director, Wealth Forum

13 January 2018

We present the 4th annual edition of our Mirror Report (titled after an adaptation of the fabled phrase “Mirror on the wall, who is the fastest of them all?”) – which analyses business growth of fund houses over the calendar year 2017 as well as over the current bull phase for the industry, which started in 2014 and has accelerated significantly over these 4 years.

As always, we have divided fund houses into 3 categories: The Leaders (Top 10), The Challengers (Next 10) and the Aspirers (Rest of fund houses).

Champions of the 4 year industry Bull Run

The first data table traces AuM growth by fund house for the 4 year period January 2014 to December 2017. Data considered therefore is quarterly AAuM for the period Oct-Dec 2013 as the starting point and Oct-Dec 2017 as the end point. Which fund houses have made best use of industry tailwinds and which ones turned out to be laggards in this bull phase? Have the bigger fund houses grown faster than the smaller ones or has a rising tide lifted smaller companies faster? Let’s find out.

A few observations:

1. Between 2016 and 2017, some notable changes have taken place in the composition of the 3 groups. Axis MF storms into the Leaders group on the back of sustained high growth, as do Mirae Asset and Motilal Oswal into the Challengers group. Our heartiest congratulations to these 3 fund houses for literally taking their businesses to the next level.

2. The industry can look back with tremendous satisfaction on the distance traversed over the last 4 years. From an AuM of Rs. 8.68 lakh crs at the end of 2013, a combination of business growth and favourable markets have taken AuM to as much as Rs. 22.36 lakh crores as of Dec 2017: a 2.5x growth in just 4 years!

3. The industry seems to be growing as well as consolidating at the same time: the Leaders have grown the fastest, followed by the Challengers and then by the Aspirers. The big are getting much bigger, market share is getting more consolidated at the top.

4. The “Power Play” segment of the industry – which is the Top 5 fund houses - reveals an interesting insight:

SBI MF and ICICI Pru have made the most of this bull market in terms of business growth – and both have been rewarded in these four years – I Pru by taking the pole position and SBI MF by muscling its way into the Top 5. The pole position is now a very closely fought race between ICICI Pru and HDFC MF, with the latter covering significant ground in 2017 after a relatively slower 2015 and 2016. The next quarter (Jan-Mar 2018) could perhaps see a handing over of the baton on the pole position in the industry, if recent trends sustain. The other big fight within the Power Play segment is for the 3rd position: Aditya Birla Sun Life MF, with its sustained impressive growth in these 4 years, is now just a whisker away from Reliance MF for the 3rd spot on an AAuM basis – and, if current trends persist into the next quarter, we could well see a change in the No.3 position. Reliance MF, on the back of its impressive equity fund performance in 2017, will undoubtedly seek to turbo charge its growth in 2018, to make up for lost time in the earlier part of these 4 big years.

5. Among the Leaders, Kotak MF and Axis MF have grown significantly faster than industry in these 4 years, and have consequently seen impressive jumps in their league tables positions.

6. The Challengers group seems like a mixed bag, with L&T MF leading the way among the bigger challengers, growing way ahead of industry while others have struggled a bit to keep pace with the fast clip of industry growth. Bringing up the rear of the Challengers group are two supersonic speed engines – Mirae Asset and Motilal Oswal – who have charged into the Challengers group with hugely impressive growth rates which are in the thousands and not hundreds, albeit on low bases. In terms of absolute AuM growth, their numbers beat fund houses that are up to 4 positions higher than them on the Challengers league table. It does appear – based on the last 4 years – that all the fund houses in the Challengers group are not really challenging the leaders – its just a handful who are really doing this for the group. Which explains the fact that the Challengers as a whole have grown relatively slower than the Leaders, despite having smaller bases as starting points.

7. The Aspirers group – barring a few bright spots – has continued to disappoint over these 4 big years, growing at half the industry growth rate. Inability to make the most of favourable tail winds does point out to some strife in this segment of the industry – which may continue to see some consolidation in the years ahead.

Growth champions of 2017

Lets now turn our attention to the big year that’s just concluded. Which fund houses have emerged as the growth champions of 2017? In determining this, we have stuck to last year’s template – which is two levels of analysis – the first one is the overall AuM growth metric and the other is a weighted average growth across asset classes, with a 1.5x weight for equity, 1x for debt and 0.5x for cash assets.
Here’s how the fund houses stack up on %age growth in overall AuM:

Here’s another way of looking at the same growth – this time by drilling down into growth by asset class and assigning weights to each asset class (1.5x for equity, 1x for debt and 0.5x for cash) to get us a notional weighted average AuM growth – which we believe is a reasonable proxy for growth in quality assets.

Some observations:

1. Among the Leaders, the 1st and 2nd positions interchange between Axis MF and DSP BlackRock, depending on which metric you consider to figure out who the champion is. Kotak MF comes in 3rd on both metrics.

2. A word about HDFC MF – they top the league tables on absolute growth in AuM on both parameters – aggregate numbers as well as weighted numbers – which is a great comeback from this champion, shrugging off the relatively slower growth of 2015 and 2016.

3. Among the Challengers, the top 3 growth champions remain the same – Motilal Oswal, Mirae Asset and L&T. Sundaram was the only other fund house in this group to grow faster than industry in 2017. 6 out of the 10 Challengers posted slower than industry growth in 2017 – not a very encouraging sign when you have built up scale and should be in a position to challenge the leaders.

4. Among the 20 fund houses that make up the Aspirers group, 9 grew faster than the industry average of 32%, 3 grew marginally slower than industry while 8 grew much slower than industry. The last set is perhaps where the biggest stress will be going forward, as Boards of some may begin getting restive with the businesses unable to make the most of favourable industry tail winds.

5. Since equity is what’s driving the markets and the industry, lets look at who the equity growth champions have been in 2017:

The equity growth champion for 2017 is HDFC MF, followed by ICICI Prudential and Aditya Birla Sun Life. The green band signifies AMCs that account for 80% of equity growth – which is just 10 fund houses. The yellow band along with the green band cumulate to 95% of industry equity AuM growth – which is concentrated in 17 names. The next 23 fund houses collectively account for only 5% of equity AuM growth in 2017. If equity is likely to continue leading the way in this round of industry growth, this table tells us just who the growth champions of this cycle are likely to be and who are most likely to miss out on this big growth cycle that the industry is witnessing.

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