Union MF to sniff Rs 15,000-cr mark by March

Mumbai: UnionMutual Fund,which has been an also-ran since its launch in 2012, is on a growth path now and is looking at adding at least 50 per cent more to the AUM this fiscal, sniffing at Rs15,000 crore by March.

Despite having 22 funds (21 open-ended and one close-ended funds), the fund house sponsored by Union Bank of India and Japanese major Daiichi Life could not reach anywhere in the pecking order in the 43-player scattered industry that controls more than Rs43 lakh crore of public money in its over 11 years of operations.. In the year to March 2023, it had an AUM of just Rs 9,853 crore across 4.96 lakh live folios from 21 cities. Daiichi picked a 39.64 per cent stake in the MF in May 2018. But in terms of its presence in small towns, Union MF does reasonably well with 32 per cent of the AUM coming in from the B30 (beyond top 30) cities and the rest from the T30 (top 30) cities. “As of June our AUM stood at Rs10,700 crore, up from Rs9,853 crore in March 2023. We hope to take the AUM to around Rs15,000 crore by next March as we plan to launch a large thematic fund next month from which we hope to collect at least Rs 500 crore during the NFO period. Of course, a lot will depend on the market,” chief executive G Pradeepkumar. Pradeepkumar has been with the fund house from day 1 and was, in fact, the first employee, and had earlier worked with UTI for long, when the public sector fund house faced the Unit 64 crisis leading to the bailout of the scheme in the late 1990s.