BoB mutual fund, a fringe player till date with four schemes and assets under management of less than Rs 50 crore, now intends to launch a growth fund and a balanced fund for which the draft offers are to be filed with Sebi, the managing director of BoB Asset Management Company ltd, MJ Agni, said here on Thursday.

Agni added that the new schemes would be jointly marketed during the initial offer period by identified bank branches of BoB and Karvy Consultants through their 11 branches and investor service centres. Agni, who joined the AMC in August 1998, spent the first two year consolidating the mutual fund operations.

"After gaining the experience of managing an open end fund, ELSS'96, we are now in a position to launch more open end funds.

After a reasonable interval from the introduction of the growth and balanced funds we propose to have a gilt fund also," Agni pointed out.

According to Agni, all the schemes of BoB MF have now turned around in 1999-2000 and this is why the AMC was able to declare maiden dividends to its unitholders under all the schemes except ELSS'95.

The dividend for 1999-2000 in BoB Growth'95 was 10 per cent, and in ELSS'96 and ELSS'97 it was 20 per cent and 8 per cent respectively.

As on date, BoB MF has three close end schemes and one open end scheme (ELSS'96 which was converted into an open end scheme with effect from March 23,2000). ELSS'95 and BoB Growth'95 schemes have net assets of Rs 23 crore and Rs 20 crore respectively while the ELSS'96 and ELSS'97 schemes have assets of Rs 3.5 crore and Rs 1.5 crore respectively.

All the close ended schemes of the mutual fund are available for repurchase with ELSS'97 becoming available for repurchase from April 1,2000.

Agni said the AMC operations were now profitable with its networth at Rs 13.80 crore. Its paid-up equity at present is Rs 10 crore and the sponsor (Bank of Baroda), he added, was committed to pump in more funds towards capital of AMC as and when required.

Although all the schemes of BoB MF showed positive growth in assets during 1999-2000, there have slippages in net assets in the current month when compared to the levels in March 2000.

BoB Growth'95 had recorded asset growth of 32.6 per cent in the year to March 31,2000 but since then to June 30 this year, assets have declined by about 9 per cent against a 5 per cent fall in the BSE Sensex during the period.

Similarly, ELSS'95 net assets grew in the year to March 31, 2000 by 43 per cent but declined by about 9 per cent with a NAV of Rs 9.73 on July 12. Agni said the equity portfolios had been restructured in the last two years accompanied by regular churning with portfolio turnover (the traded value divided by the portfolio size expressed as a percentage) at 300 per cent.Agni said the sectorwise exposure in all the schemes were maintained at about 20 per cent in information technology, 10 per cent in FMCG, 10 per cent in pharma and the balance in other industry sectors.