UTI MF sells stocks worth Rs 1600 cr in June quarter

UTI Mutual Fund (UTI MF) has been a heavy seller in Sensex and mid-cap stocks, offloading shares worth over Rs 1,600 crore during the quarter ended June . The proceeds were utilised to buy shares worth Rs 1,300 crore in other Sensex and mid-cap and small cap stocks.

In a major overhauling of its equity portfolio, the fund house sold its entire holding in 47 small and mid-cap stocks worth over Rs 100 crore. The fund booked partial profits in 125 small and medium cap stocks, striping 84 million shares for Rs 515 crore.

Profit booking in Sensex stocks continued unabated during the quarter ended June 2005, selling 17.2 million shares of 22 Sensex stocks at the aggregate market value of Rs 1,000 crore. Major selling was seen in Reliance Industries, Hindustan Lever, Satyam Computer, Infosys Technologies and State Bank of India.

UTI sold around six million shares of Hindustan Lever, over three million shares of Reliance Industries, over a million shares each of ACC, Satyam Computer and SBI, over five lakh shares of Gujarat Ambuja Cement, Infosys Technologies, ITC and TCS.

The fund house emptied its holding in 47 companies by selling 150 million shares for a market value of over Rs 105 crore. The sweeping was done in Essar Oil, Eskay K'n'it, Hindustan Organic, Jindal Vijaynagar Steel, Jet Airways, and Tata Elxsi

UTI MF increased its holding in seven Sensex stocks, buying around 8.9 million shares for Rs 200 crore. The fund bought 44 lakh shares of NTPC, 28 lakh shares of Bharti Tele-Ventures; over four lakh shares each of Tata Motors and HDFC, around 2.5 lakh shares of HDFC Bank and around four lakh shares of ONGC.

The UTI MF added 56.5 million shares of small and mid-cap stocks for Rs 1,100 crore. The fund participated in public issues buying shares of Shopper's Stop, Shringar Cinema, Gokaldas Exports and Dwarikesh Sugar.

Despite heavy profit booking, buoyancy in stock prices saw the corpus under management increase by around Rs 1,300 crore to Rs 21,840 crore. The pharmaceuticals sector tops the fund's investment chart, followed by infotech, banks, refineries, capital goods, petrochemicals and cement.