
Goldman Sachs India Equity Portfolio

Goldman Sachs India Equity Portfolio's objective is to capture the growth potential of the Indian economy. It is focused on investing in sound businesses of all sizes. Company meetings are a crucial part of the process, and the team's ability to meet companies on the ground in India differentiates it from many in its peer group.
Our Opinion
Fund Manager
Fund Manager

Aman Batra, Lead Manager Aman is the head of the Head of India Equities at Goldmand Sachs and Lead Portfolio Manager India Equity. He joined the fund’s team in October 2009 from Kotak Institutional Equities, where he was the lead analyst covering the Power and Cement sectors. Prior to joining Kotak in November 2004, Aman worked at Morgan Stanley with the Equity Research team and at ICICI Bank within the credit risk management group. Aman received a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow in 2001 and a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering in 1999.
Fund Performance
Risk
Company Description
Investment process
The team starts by evaluating the attractiveness of a company's industry. Highly competitive, capital-intensive industries with low returns may be ignored entirely. The team will then focus on the valuation of a business. Real cash flows are prioritised over paper profits and Hiren only invests where he sees the opportunity for a substantial gain. The team never says no to a meeting as it can always learn something about the industry, even if it has no intention of investing.
Risk
Goldman Sachs India Equity Portfolio is well diversified, with between 70 and 90 holdings to reduce stock-specific risk. This is a single country fund with a bias towards medium and smaller companies, so it is heavily dependent on the Indian economy and it will be volatile as a result. Investors should also be aware of the currency risk.
ESG
ESG - Integrated
Rather than a rules-based approach, GSAM incorporates ESG in its philosophy and approach to finding companies. The fund focuses on finding businesses with the ability to generate sustainably higher returns on invested capital, which is measured through assessing cash flow generation. The managers believe this is a powerful indicator of good ESG practices. Firms with negative ESG characteristics are likely to receive fines, have opaque accounts or poor capital allocations which are unlikely to produce good free cash flows. This results in exclusions for failing firms. If the fund is presented with two very similar investment opportunities, the managers would look to allocate to the one with better ESG practices than those with more short-term upside, but lower ESG standards. This work is based on a risk-based framework assessing the material impact of ESG issues. It is supported by regular company engagement which helps to creates in-depth, proprietary ESG knowledge. This engagement goes beyond the analysis though, with thought leadership and engagement efforts from GSAM’s Global Stewardship team helping with proxy voting and managing wider GSAM strategic issues against their portfolio companies.




