About

ASK Capital forms part of the ASK Group, a leading financial services industry player in India established in 1983 that manages the wealth and investment needs of some of the most affluent families in India. The group is India’s largest discretionary portfolio manager with over $10bn in AUM. In 2022, Blackstone (the world's largest global alternative asset manager) acquired a majority stake of 70% in the group.

India contributes over 3.5% to global GDP, but is only ~1% of MSCI World Index, and ~0.2% of global portfolios. We believe that India is deeply under-represented, and the country is likely to have a greater share of relevant benchmarks in the future. Investments such as this will be increasingly relevant to investors, in our view.

The ASK Indian Entrepreneur strategy was launched in 2010 and is ASK’s flagship strategy. The portfolio invests into profitable family-owned (ownership of over 25%) companies that have demonstrated high standards of governance, vision, execution, capital allocation and capital distribution skills. These entrepreneurs run businesses that are amongst the highest in long-term earnings growth, and ASK portfolio companies have a minimum ROCE of 25%.

3 Reasons Why We’re Partnered with ASK

• Focus on Family Ownership

  • ASK Capital was founded by two brothers (Asit and Sameer Koticha) who retained majority control until 2022 when Blackstone acquired a controlling stake. The focus on entrepreneur led and family controlled public businesses in India leads to a portfolio of well managed, well aligned management teams running high quality businesses. There is plenty of academic evidence that listed family controlled businesses (e.g. Hermes, Estee Lauder) outperform - Credit Suisse data on 1000 family-owned companies (over the period 2006 - 2022) demonstrated outperformance against non-family-owned peer groups by an annual average of 300 basis points.

• Long-Term Compounding Approach

  • As evidence of the team’s ability to invest in high quality businesses that enjoy a large opportunity set to compound against, the average holding period of ASK’s portfolio is 4.9 Years

• Depth of Experience

  • The strategy stems from a desire to seek sustained capital preservation and growth from the Indian Equities market by means of a knowledge driven bottom-up approach, a result of deep experience in the Indian market (the investment committee has an average of 33 years investment experience).