Q: There has been some talk in India over the last few days of interest rates having bottomed out, and eventually, heading higher because of the government’s large borrowing programme. What are your thoughts on that and how would you translate that into your investment call in the financial space where you seem to have holdings in many of the large private sector financial stocks?

A: We have large holdings in the likes of HDFC and ICICI as well in our Indian portfolios and one of the macro problems India is facing is on the government and deficit front. We would not necessarily be surprised to see interest rates moving upwards at some stage. Although the economic outlook is still cloudy there is no immediate pressure. A stock investors for us primarily what we are looking for is the companies that are well-run, well-financed and have a solid long-term business plan and that’s what drives us over the long-term. Short-term, yes, worries about interest rates, government deficits and slightly disappointing budget have slight put us off shorter-term but then we look again at the companies and what we see at the company level we are very encouraged by.

Q: There have been large dollops of paper on offer as well particularly from spaces like infrastructure and real estate in the form of Qualified Institutional Placement (QIP). Have you been looking at that as well?

A: No we haven’t. We have been sticking to our knitting for example recently we have been topping-up holding structure, Hindustan Unilever, so we have been keeping pretty plain vanilla as far as our portfolios are concerned.