Gurmeet Singh: Basically, today we live in a world of innovation and you know what this, I believe what Nippon is trying to do through this fund is they are letting the investors participate in these exciting new opportunities of these forward looking businesses.

What is also being conveyed here is that innovation is not limited to just inventing or launching new products and they are also trying to dispel this misconception that this only consists of I.T. companies, startups or small caps. What is on offering here is basically trying to encompass the various kinds of innovations, be it a product innovation, business innovation, or a process innovation.

To put things in perspective for an instance if I have to take a real-world example, there’s a large fintech company, which is basically a financial services company which took a business which is decades and centuries old, which is a lending business and we did a product with new features, where there was low-cost EMI, there was quick dispersal, leveraging technology, and there was low cost of acquisition, which basically was a hit with consumers and as a result, they gave a huge market share.

So, it was not a new business, this is an example that innovation can happen in existing business. Another example of a business transformation or renovation could be where a company which started off reviewing restaurants then, today is one of the largest food delivery companies. So, innovation can come in, in different businesses. What I believe is they’re trying to launch a fund which captures everything. They’re going to be focusing on a high growth businesses, high quality businesses, companies, so if you see the innovation today, all the disruptors, innovators, today, you are having a disruption and each and every business. Look at the way we now look at banking.

So, for example, if you see that I haven’t visited my own branch in the last 10 years because I could achieve/retrieve everything through net banking. Look at the way today, you know, the OTT platform has changed the way we sort of see entertainment, the way we consume entertainment, this is completely changed.

So this fund is exclusively going to be catering or investing into the companies which are doing some kind of innovation and it is not limited only as I have mentioned earlier to the information technology or the startups, for example, we will also be looking at MNCs, which have a global sort of research presence, and they have a presence in India and they will leverage sort of their global research to scale up their business in India and also, companies if you see there’s a lot of private capital, which has gone into these new age businesses over the last few years. So, at some point in time, they will be looking for public participation. These businesses try and sort of capture those.

Having said that, I must mention that these businesses will be investing to the new businesses. So the investors who will consider investing in these funds should consider a longer-term horizon as compared to your normal diversified equity fund because when you’re trying to invest into the company’s future, looking companies that that adoption of technology takes time and for those business to actually scale and gain meaningful market share, it takes some time for I think for that reason, the investor should have a longer-term horizon when they invest into scheme like these and this should be a part of their satellite portfolio rather than being a part of their core portfolio.