Five leading FII brokers corner a major chunk of investments

By Nisha Das | 22 Dec 2003

Mumbai: Five leading institutional brokers — Credit Lyonnais, UBS Securities, JM Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan India and HSBC Securities — have together cornered Rs 9,390.80 crore business of the total Rs 15,768-crore net foreign institutional investments in India during the current fiscal.

According to a Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) report to the finance ministry, the foreign institutional investors (FIIs) have routed around 60 per cent of their investment through these five institutional brokers while the next five brokers got around 11.0 per cent of the FIIs' net investment in the country in the current fiscal (up to 13 October 2003).

The SEBI report shows that Credit Lyonnais handled the most FII business amounting to Rs 3,253.6 crore (around 2.06 per cent) of the Rs 15,768-crore net FII investments during the period. Credit Lyonnais is followed by UBS Securities, which handled Rs 1,976 crore business, while JM Morgan Stanley Securities got Rs 1,950.4 crore FII business. JP Morgan India received Rs 1,436.2 crore while HSBC Securities got Rs 774.6-crore business.

Among domestic brokerage houses, Enam Securities got Rs 532.7 crore of the FIIs' business followed by Motilal Oswal Securities, which managed a business of Rs 448.8 crore and Refco Sify Securities got Rs 199-crore business.

During the current fiscal the FIIs have pumped in $6 billion into the Indian stock markets. The Bombay Stock Exchange Sensex has added 1,922.68 points (nearly 57 per cent) till date in the current year, to close at 5299.96 on Thursday. This performance makes it one of the best performing indices in the world.

Between May and October 2003, the US-based Fidelity Management made the largest net investments of Rs 1,822.60 crore, followed by Janus Investment (Rs 1,389 crore), Morgan Stanley (1,138 crore), the Singapore government (Rs 1,123 crore), HSBC Global (Rs 934 crore) and Credit Lyonnais (Rs 893 crore).

Other FIIs active in the Indian markets include UBS Securities, Putnam Fiduciary, Grantham Mayo, Van and Citigroup Global Markets. Interestingly, a lot of new FIIs have also invested in the Indian markets and this list includes Platinum Asset Management and Aberdeen Asset Managers.