Franklin India Prima Plus: Good in good times, and bad, too

The past one year has been extremely volatile for markets. In such a situation, schemes which have weathered long cycles of markets and given consistently encouraging performance must be the ones which should be considered. One such scheme is Franklin India Prima Plus. The scheme has a performance record of two decades. Being one of the oldest schemes, it has seen more market cycles than its most peers. The scheme has performed well not only in bull phases but also in bear. For instance, between January 2008 and January 2009, when the Nifty fell 55%, the scheme fell by relatively lower 49%. In the past five-year and ten-year periods, the scheme has delivered 18.1% and 16.1 % returns, respectively, while its category schemes have given 15% and 13.3%, respectively.



The scheme’s fund manager Anand Radhakrishnan and his team follow the strategy of identifying companies which have strong return on capital employed and competitive strengths with respective to its peers which are sustainable even in tough market conditions. Also, being a multi-cap scheme, it has a fair amount exposure to companies across market capitalisation. The scheme has dedicated 65-70% of its portfolio to large-sized companies, 20-30% to mid-sized companies and the rest to small-sized companies. Recently, the scheme enhanced its exposure to big firms which have sound fundamentals but had fallen in volatility. These are Infosys, Dr. Reddy’s Lab, BPCL, and Cadila Healthcare.