South Korea's Mirae Asset Group is open to inducting a strategic partner in its Indian asset management company, which is aiming to achieve profitability at operating level in the current financial year.
Established in November 2006, Mirae Global Investments India -- the investment manager to Mirae Asset Mutual Fund -- is to build sizeable corpus in both debt and equity segments to help it become a major player in the next five years.
"We had entered the Indian market on our own and have committed significant capital for building our business...We may look at a strategic partner for our mutual fund business in India if we feel it can help grow our business faster and the partner has same principles and growth strategy as we have," Mirae Global Investments India CEO Jisang Yoo told PTI.
Establishing a successful Asset Management Company (AMC) is a "long-term process" and we have finished the first stage of our business plan in India, which is putting performing funds on the table," he said, adding India is "very important" in Mirae's Emerging Market strategy.
"Now we are preparing for the second stage of garnering Assets Under Management...The AMC is on the correct track as this fiscal we hope to make operating profits," Yoo said.
Seoul-headquartered Mirae Asset Financial Group, founded by Hyeon-Joo Park, had invested $50 million of seed capital in India with an aim to build the "business block by block".
"We are currently associated with 5,000 distributors, including leading foreign private banks, wealth outfits, national distributors and independent financial advisors...We would be providing training to our channel partners across specific cities on different modules," he said.
Mirae has won several institutional mandates and is keen to pursue Qualified Foreign Investor flows into funds here since the group has strong distribution network in Asia- Pacific, he added.
Mirae Asset MF is also looking to plug gaps in product portfolio that at present has international stock funds, diversified equity funds, debt and money market schemes.
"We are looking at Balanced Funds which would suite moderate risk profile investors and is an offering missing from our product basket," Yoo said.