Majority of the mutual fund houses reported a fall in the average asset under management (AUM) in December, leading to a fall in industry's AUM by close to 3 per cent to Rs 7.789 lakh crore.
In November the mutual fund industry – comprising 37 mutual fund houses – had reported a growth in AUM by 5.9 per cent to Rs 8.075 lakh crore.
For December, only three mutual funds with AUM of Rs 3,000 crore in November were yet to report the previous month's assets.
The biggest drop of Rs 5,216 crore was seen in HDFC Mutual Fund, its AUM for December was Rs 97,184 crore as against Rs 1,02,400 crore in the previous month, monthly data provided by Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI) showed.
Reliance Mutual Fund, the country's top fund house in terms of AUM, also saw a drop in the assets to Rs 1,19,981 crore (Rs 1,22,252 crore).
However, a small number of fund houses registered increase in their AUM.
LIC Mutual Fund's AUM grew by Rs 2,779 crore to Rs 51,502 crore. Franklin Templeton Mutual Fund's asset grew by Rs 1,373 crore to Rs 31,962.11 crore, Benchmark Mutual Fund's asset grew by Rs 336 crore to Rs 2,008 crore, Canara Robeco's asset base grew by Rs 324 crore and Mirae Asset's fund grew by Rs 10.66 crore.
AUM of Benchmark Mutual Fund, which has quite a few index based exchange traded funds, and Gold Exchange Traded Fund went up by 20 per cent in December. “People are now finding index funds attractive and we have seen inflows in all our index funds including Gold ETF and S&P 500 index fund,” Mr Rajen Mehta, Executive Director, Benchmark Mutual Fund, said.
Industry's AUM under fund of funds (domestic) registered a rise by Rs 88.89 crore to Rs 1,042.67 crore.