Dailyhunt
News|Video|Viral
Andrew Holland: 'I'd Bet 80% Of My Money On India'

Andrew Holland: 'I'd Bet 80% Of My Money On India'

rediff.com 4 days ago

'Everyone was against China, India was the shining star -- and how that's reversed now. But we know we're going to get to a point where that will reverse again and India will come back.'

He came for a beer conversation to India and stayed for nearly three decades. When Andrew Holland flew into Mumbai in 1997 -- lured by a Merrill Lynch pitch tied to their freshly acquired stake in DSP -- he was already a seasoned hand in Asian markets, having built a top-rated equities research operation in South Korea from scratch.

India, he sensed, was different. Not difficult, just different. And somewhere between the IPO sheets piled outside a Mumbai garage on his first visit in 1993 and the city's explosion of restaurants and retail wealth since, it quietly became home.

Key Points

  • 'India is not an AI play -- not yet. We don't have anything, whereas South Korea, Taiwan, China, they've got everything that you want. That's where the money's been going and that's where the money's been chasing.'
  • 'The IT companies were in a good position. If any of those companies had made acquisitions, India would be seen completely differently than it is today in terms of AI.'
  • 'I decided one year I wasn't going to do gold coins, I'm going to do bitcoins -- I felt this is something that younger people would adopt more easily than me, who's older. And that's been the case.'
  • 'If you asked me to put my money anywhere in the world, 80% would be in India. I think we're at the cusp of something a lot larger.'

Today, Holland is one of the more quietly influential voices in Indian institutional investing -- a man who called India's bull run early, built some of its largest hedge funds, and has consistently refused to dress up uncertainty as conviction.

Andrew Holland, Head of New Asset Classes at Nippon Asset Management. Photograph: Hitesh Harisinghani/Rediff

As Head of New Asset Classes at Nippon Asset Management, he is now pioneering Specialised Investment Funds (SIFs), a SEBI-introduced category that, for the first time, allows mutual fund investors to hedge their portfolios -- at a ticket size of just Rs 10 lakh, a fraction of what Aletrantive Investment Funds demand.

But sit down with Holland and the conversation quickly moves beyond product launches. He is candid about India's missed opportunity in AI -- "the IT companies were in a good position to make acquisitions rather than give money back to shareholders," he says, with the bluntness of someone who has watched capital flow decisions up close for thirty years.

He is equally frank about why FIIs have been selling: It is not a crisis of faith in India, he argues, but a cold-blooded asset allocation call toward markets that offer an AI narrative and cheaper valuations.

The markets, he believes, have already priced in the US-Israel-Iran war pain.

Dailyhunt
Disclaimer: This content has not been generated, created or edited by Dailyhunt. Publisher: rediff.com