Mumbai, Nov 7: Tata Mutual Fund has reduced its exposure in affiliated companies under the Tata group from 24.08 per cent on March 31, 1997, to 14.14 per cent on September 30. This came to light in its half-yearly report for 1997-98. Although Sebi's regulations require the mandatory disclosure and transparency of portfolios only on an annual basis, Tata Mutual has been giving this data on a half-yearly basis.

Further in keeping with Sebi's diktat on limiting investments only to listed securities, Tata Income Scheme will be redeeming its investment in the privately placed short term debentures of a listed company.

The investment amount of Rs 4.97 crore will be redeemed by this month. As per the report, the total corpus of the five domestic funds stands at Rs 192.49 crore.

The offshore fund, KBIM India Fund plc, where the AMC acts as an investment advisor, has a corpus of Rs 63.72 crore.

Tata Mutual has witnessed small redemptions under its open-ended funds at Rs 2.21 crore in the first-half of the current fiscal.

Meanwhile, in terms of performance, the open-ended Tata Equity Growth Fund has outperformed the BSE indices with an NAV growth of 9.47 per cent against a 8.9 per cent rise in the Sensex and a 3.30 per cent rise in the Natex in the six-month period.

The Tata Young Citizen's Fund has also outperformed the indices with an NAV growth of 17.55 per cent. However, the Tata Tax Saving Fund and the Tata Core Sector equity fund still underperform these benchmarks.

Tata Mutual Fund proposes to launch three new funds - an income fund, a balanced fund and the Tata retirement pension plan. However, the pension fund is still awaiting clearance from CBDT.

Meanwhile, KN Atmaramani, managing director of the AMC, has said that the equity markets are likely to witness a movement in the range of 3,700 and 4,200. The investment strategy should be to book more profits as and when the opportunities come and reinvest the same in growth scrips at lower levels.

In the first half of the current year, the equity fund has already booked profits of more than Rs 3 crore as against Rs 2 crore reported in1996-97.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.