India’s largest actively managed equity fund is betting against investor fears over artificial intelligence’s impact on the outsourcing industry as it snaps up the nation’s beaten-down IT stocks.
PPFAS Mutual Fund’s $14.9 billion Flexi Cap Fund has added exposure to IT services companies over the past three months to May as valuations cooled sharply. The fund has also been buying stocks in sectors including financials, utilities and coal mining while deploying cash that had previously been parked in debt and money-market instruments, according to Chief Investment Officer for equities Rajeev Thakkar.
“This whole pessimism that everything will be brought back in-house and no one will outsource any work, or these models will be so efficient that end-to-end everything will be done by the models and no humans will be required — I don’t see that pessimism as being realistic,” he said in an interview on June 11.
