The investments of the funds are made to different important segments of the pharma industry like CRAMS, domestic and international businesses.

Asset Size: The fund's AUM is around 564 crore as of March 2012.

Performance:

This fund is the best performing Pharma fund in India over a 5 year period. Fundsupermart.com's research team has been recommending this fund for the past three years.

As on 8 May 2012, the fund has a five year CAGR return of 21.66 percent, which came in above that its benchmark returns, which delivered 12.73 percent over the same period of time. Mr. Shailesh Raj Bhan has been actively managing this fund since 2005.

The Reliance Pharma fund has been outperforming its peers since its inception. This shows the quality of stocks that the fund has got in its portfolio.

Chart 1: Showing performance of all the Pharma Funds as on 9 May 2012

We can clearly see from the table given below that the FMCG and Health Care sectors have outperformed BSE Sensex over 1 year, 3 years and 5 years basis

Chart 2: Showing performance of BSE Sensex with BSE FMCG and FMCG Health Care as on 9 May 2012.

Fundsupermart.com's research team expects these sectors to continue their outperformance in 2012 also at the back of the strong consumption growth especially in the rural segment. Plus, there is growth potential in the generic market along with the consolidation that is expected in the Pharmaceutical space.

(The Author is Debanjan Guha Thakurta, Analyst from Fundsupermart.com.)