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India's Edelweiss to focus on ME, eye UAE SWFs

India's leading diversified financial services group offers a large range of products and services spanning across asset classes and consumer segments.

Edelweiss, India's leading diversified financial services group, is currently assessing opportunities with UAE Sovereign Wealth Funds or SWFs, large family offices and private banks in Middle East, said Nitin Jain, CEO, Global Asset & Wealth Management, Edelweiss Group.
Jain, who was on his visit to Dubai recently, said: "Our job is to help people make right long-term investments and currently India offers a lot of opportunities in various segments as it serves as perfect hedge for UAE economy. Middle East investors - who are exposed to oil - should start looking at India."
Edelweiss offers a large range of products and services spanning across asset classes and consumer segments. Its businesses are broadly divided into credit including retail finance and debt capital markets, commodities, financial markets, asset management and life insurance. The group's research driven approach and proven history of innovation has enabled it to foster strong relationships across corporate, institutional and individual clients. The life insurance, retail finance including housing finance, mutual fund and retail broking businesses - both online and offline formats, have paved the way for Edelweiss to cater to the large retail client segment. Edelweiss' covers 240 offices in 125 cities including eight international offices with 5,555 employees catering to over 572,000 clients across various businesses in retail and wholesale segments.
Speaking on current global turmoil, Jain said: "The epicenter of the recent global market volatility lies in problems faced by commodity producers and emerging markets. While a sharp decline in commodity prices have created the fault lines, China seems to be at the center of the recent bout of volatility. Our advice to investors is that they should continue to hold their core equity holding, we advise a cautious stance on adding further to stock portfolios at this point. We recommend exiting leverage positions and keeping some elbow room to deploy cash at optimum levels. There will be a much more conducive environment not far into the future where risk reward will skew back to a more favourable situation."
When asked Jain, how resilient is UAE economy from global financial meltdown impact? he said: "The UAE remains partially resilient from global economic slowdown due to its large economic buffers in terms of current account surplus (12 per cent of GDP), fiscal surplus (6 per cent) and contained inflation. GDP growth for UAE is at 3.6 per cent in 2014 while the non-oil growth was even higher at 4.8 per cent driven by construction spend in Abu Dhabi and services backed by Dubai's transportation and hospitality sectors. Although these factors cushion UAE's economy and reduce the vulnerability to external risks, it does not completely insulate it from a global risk off scenario." The CEO noted that since UAE is constantly trying to develop its infrastructure in terms of national airports, road networks, real estate etc, this sector will continue to have an important role in UAE. "We advise market participants to invest in fundamentally strong companies that have an efficient management and strong growth prospects. Opportunity size, return ratios and profitability ratios should be analysed before making investments."
Backed by the strong reserves and the current account surplus, UAE markets should be able to absorb the short term global volatility which Edelweiss expects to last over the next six to nine months. "Investors should approach the markets with caution. Current situation warrants to look beyond traditional investments strategy and geographies. With low crude prices, one can look at investing in India and Japan which benefits from low commodities prices, it can to an extent provide a natural hedge to offset low prices in the home country by growth in the investing country," concluded Jain.
- sandhya@khaleejtimes.com