MSCI has said that the weightage of Bharti Airtel in the MSCI Global Standard Indices will be raised in the February 2021 quarterly review. Domestic fund managers have been adding positions in Bharti over the last couple of years, making it the sixth-largest stock holding by mutual funds.

The total fund exposure to Bharti has risen to 2.8 percent for earlier 1 percent, said Kaustubh Belapurkar, Director-Fund Research of Morningstar Investment Adviser on Friday.

“It has been an interesting move in Bharti over the last couple of years. If I look at the exposure that managers had on an aggregate basis of their overall equity exposure, it was about less than a percent when I go back two years in December 2018. A few managers started adding up through the course of 2019 and that exposure on an aggregate basis went up to 1.8 percent. But 2020 was a different ball game altogether where we had a significant amount of additions happening. So that number has actually gone up to 2.8 percent which has allowed Bharti to leapfrog in the overall holdings that managers hold,” he told CNBC-TV18.

Belapurkar said that a large part of allocation has already happened from a domestic perspective. However, he believes that the global managers that look at the MSCI could be an interesting play.

“The global money or the global managers that track the MSCI which is a very widely used index from managers staying out of US, Europe and other parts of the world, I think that could be an interesting play because we have close to about $220 billion that are invested in Indian equities through these global mutual funds. Just an example I came across, a single fund which is a $160 billion fund added Bharti last year and they took an exposure of only 0.2 percent in their portfolio, but that accounted for almost 1 percent of the overall market cap of Bharti. So that is the quantum of money that we are talking about. So from a global investors’ perspective, a greater addition or greater leeway to invest can potentially add more positions in Bharti from FIIs,” he said.

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(Edited by : Ajay Vaishnav)