Unit Trust of India's Mahila Unit Scheme plans to cut the exit load for investors in the next few months. It also plans to launch an aggressive awareness campaign to promote the scheme. Mahila Unit, an open-ended debt-oriented scheme for women, aims at providing an enabler to women for pooling their own savings so as to get periodic cashflows.
Currently, the exit load for the scheme is five per cent, four per cent and three per cent for one, two and three years respectively. UTI plans to reduce this to three, two and one per cent for one, two and three years. Luke Fernandez, assistant general manager at UTI said: "We plan to cut the exit load in the scheme to reduce the burden on the investors and enable them to get higher returns."
Mahila Unit is a relative small fund with a corpus of Rs 9 crore spread across 7,000 investors. Of the total corpus, 74 per cent is invested in corporate bonds of medium to long-term maturities with an average yield of 11.62 per cent while the balance is in equities. The scheme, since inception, has given a return of 9.88 per cent (non-annualised).
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"Since the fund is relatively small, the entire equity portfolio is diversified in not more than 15 companies across sectors," Luke Fernandez said.
The fund currently has heavy exposure in FMCG and pharma stocks and plans to invest in software stocks. "However, we would avoid investing in second-tier companies, but increase trading in its portfolio to generate higher returns," he said.