A Capital meeting in Bangalore today

Capital International has picked Bangalore for its emerging market board meeting on Thursday, the first board meeting of any Capital group company in India.

The group operates through five arms "" Capital International, Capital Guardian, Capital Research and Management, Capital Bank and Trust and American Funds "" and has an exposure of between $1.5 billion and $2 billion to the Indian market.

The Capital group has been aggressively buying stocks of Indian companies. It holds over a 20 per cent stake in Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC) and a 15.5 per cent in ICICI Bank. It also has exposure to Reliance Industries and Infosys, among other companies.

Naturally, board members were wined and dined and wooed in Mumbai.

Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie and Finance Minister Jaswant Singh's adviser Vijay Kelkar met the Capital International board.

Over the last two days, State Bank of India Chairman A K Purwar, ICICI Bank CEO and Managing Director K V Kamath and Hindustan Lever Chairman Vindi Banga made presentations too.

"It was a close interaction with Indian industrialists. The entire Capital board was split in three to attend three different dinners across Mumbai where captains of industry thronged," a source said.

The dinners were hosted by the Indian head of a foreign bank, the director of a very large private company and the director of a shipping company.

Members of the Capital International emerging market board flew to Bangalore today to meet India's software czars.

CLSA and JM Morgan are believed to have organised Capital International's do in India. The group began investing in Asia in the 1950s and set up offices in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore in the 1980s.

For its Asian operations, the group employs 165 associates, including 65 portfolio managers, research analysts and other investment professionals. A large part of these associates, managers and analysts are in India now, along with the board members.

To be sure, Capital International is only treading a well-trodden foreign institutional investor (FII) path. Jardine Fleming has for quite some time been holding its board meetings once a year in India.

With the stock market booming (in calendar 2003 the BSE Sensex gained 72.9 per cent), other FIIs have started taking a closer look at the Indian market. The Washington-based Emerging Markets Funds too recently flew its board to India.

Brokerage houses too have started holding investor conferences in India. Merrill Lynch, for example, threw a bash for its investors in Goa last month.

This was attended by a galaxy of fund managers who track emerging markets. The security trading arm of Deutsche Bank too held a conference recently in India.

But JM Morgan Stanley Securities has decided to postpone its investors' conference to September as it first wants to get a feel of the markets after the elections.