Wanted Fund managers for booming India plans

Mutual funds in India are facing a severe shortage of skillful stock pickers, posing a challenge in managing millions of dollars in individual savings and for new entrants such as J.P. Morgan and AIG.
Adding to the crisis, many top notch money managers are moving to less stressful positions such as advisers or consultants that offer fatter pay cheques and a more leisurely lifestyle.
The difficulty to find a suitable candidate forced HSBC Asset Management India to scrap the position of chief investment officer. "It is tough to find people with expertise in both equities and fixed-income to be a CIO, so we have decided to have equities and fixed income heads," Sanjay Prakash, chief executive at HSBC Asset Management, said.
Assets of India's 30 mutual funds jumped 63 percent in the year to July to nearly $62 billion as individual investors in a booming economy growing at about 8 percent a year ploughed money into mutual funds.
India's funds industry has drawn many global houses including Fidelity, Franklin Templeton and Merrill Lynch over the past decade. Foreign funds have a total investment of more than $44 billion in India.
The manpower shortage is the biggest challenge for the industry, even after salaries have soared to about 10 million rupees ($215,000) a year, plus bonuses, from as low as 300,000-400,000 rupees in a start-up private sector mutual fund in the mid-1990s.
"It is tough to get a fund manager these days," said S.N. Rajan, former chief investment officer at Kotak Mahindra Mutual Fund who now advises rich clients. "It takes a few years to groom one. You can't produce a fund manager out of thin air."
HSBC's Prakash said it was hiring younger people and training them to overcome the shortage. Poaching from rivals is also par for the course, but there is no guarantee that people will stick around.
Last December, HSBC hired Anup Maheshwari as chief investment officer from DSP Merrill Lynch Fund Managers but he left for an independent adviser role in less than a year. In recent months ABN Amro Mutual Fund lost its equities fund manager Mihir Vora to HSBC, and Sandip Sabharwal quit Lotus Asset Management within a few months.