Mumbai, June 2: UTI's money market mutual fund (MMMF) has seen a net ouflow of Rs 3.8 crore from its corpus for the first time since its launch in April. Despite the increasingly good yield, the corpus has been reduced to Rs 28 crore from Rs 31.8 crore at the end of the first lock-in period of 30 days.

The first requests for redemption of units worth Rs 6 crore came last week from both corporate and retail investors. However, subsequently there were requests for re-investment from some investors and the corpus swelled again from Rs 25 crore to Rs 28 crore.

The latest net asset value of the scheme is Rs 10.0958 with an effective annualised yield of 9.65 per cent. The outflow notwithstanding, UTI officials are fairly pleased with the performance of the scheme. "Investors now have an idea of the easy liquidity in the scheme," they said, adding that the re-investment requests are an indication of the continuing interest in the scheme.

Enthused by the retail interest, UTI is planning to launch a sustained campaign targeted at professionals and high networth individuals. This will be in the form of direct mailers to them. UTI had initially targeted the scheme only at corporate entities mainly through media advertisments and direct mailers. The scheme is being sold without the aid of agents.

Corporate interest continues, say officials, and UTI has already received indications that another couple of crores will be flowing in within the next four-five days. The MMMF scheme is competing with the 30-day fixed deposits of banks and so far, it has managed to beat the 6-7 per cent yield offered by banks. Although currently the scheme is open only in Mumbai, UTI intends to farm out the sales to other centres shortly.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.