With active equity funds outperforming the benchmarks by big margins, this bull market has seen a rising incidence of fund manager churn in the mutual fund industry. The latest instance of such churn is Manish Gunwani, Deputy Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund resigning his position, reportedly to join another large AMC.

Gunwani managed two of the largest and most popular funds in the ICICI Pru portfolio. He was the sole fund manager for the Rs 13,500 crore large-cap oriented ICICI Pru Focussed Bluechip Fund and also steered the equity portion of the hybrid Rs 19,490 crore ICICI Pru Balanced Advantage Fund.

He was a co-manager in several theme funds - ICICI Pru Exports and Other Services Fund, Technology Fund and RIGHT Fund. He also handled a few schemes in the ICICI Pru Growth and Value series’, where he shared fund management responsibilities with others.

The fund house has notified investors through an addendum that the CIO of the AMC, Sankaran Naren will be stepping in, with immediate effect, to replace Manish Gunwani in all the above funds. Earlier co-managers – George Heber Joseph, Atul Patel, Rajat Chandak and Ashwin Jain will also continue with their existing co-manager responsibilities.

Manish Gunwani has been with ICICI Pru AMC since 2010, when he joined as a fund manager for equity. He has over two decades of experience in equity research, starting his career as an analyst with Prime Securities. He is a growth-style manager, while the fund’s CIO – Sankaran Naren and other Deputy CIO - Mrinal Singh lean towards the value and contrarian styles of investing, for which ICICI Pru is well-known.

Given Naren’s thirteen-year stint with ICICI Prudential AMC, his appointment as the fund manager of these schemes with a long tenure, should help reassure investors about continuity in investment process and portfolio styles for the schemes.

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