Who’s Rajiv Jain, star investor who put Rs 15,000 crore in Adani block deal

Shares of Adani Group’s listed companies surged on Friday after its promoters sold stakes worth Rs 15,446 crore to a US-based global equity-investment company, GQG Partners, in a block deal.

The Rs 15,000 crore Adani block deal, which seems to have reversed the fortunes of the conglomerate’s listed companies on the stock market, has created a lot of curiosity about the investor, GQG Partners and its chairman, Rajiv Jain.

After announcing the investment in four Adani Group stocks, Jain said, “We believe that the long-term growth prospects for these companies are substantial, and we are pleased to be investing in companies that will help advance India’s economy and energy infrastructure, including their energy transition over the long run.”

Who is Rajiv Jain?
Rajiv Jain is the co-founder, chairman and chief investment officer of GQG Partners and is known for his sharp yet traditional investment bets.

Jain, who was born and brought up in India, moved to the United States in 1990 to pursue an MBA from the University of Miami. He started off his career as a portfolio manager in 1994 at Vontobel Asset Management, where he served nearly 22 years. He then co-founded GQG Partners in June 2016.

According to his Linkedin profile, he also serves as portfolio manager and an analyst for GQG’s long-only equity strategies. Jain, who does not have a Twitter account and rarely appears on TV, has followed a fairly simple formula for investments in his growth stock funds: Nothing fancy, only bold and traditional bets.

Most of Jain’s investment bets, which have been immensely successful, revolve around traditional businesses such as oil, tobacco and banking. Jain has built GQG into a $92 billion powerhouse in less than seven years – a feat that not many startup funds have been able to achieve in recent times.

Jain, who was the Morningstar Fund Manager of the Year in 2012, is the reason why GQG excelled in 2022, even when most asset managers around the globe watched clients move out due to a global slowdown. According to Bloomberg, GQG lured $8 billion in fresh investment and three of its four flagship funds beat benchmark indexes by wide margins.

One of GQG’s biggest funds is the $26 billion Goldman Sachs GQG Partners International Opportunities Fund and since its inception in December 2016, the fund has gained 10.8 per cent a year. This is more than double the benchmark’s 3.9 per cent annual report, added the Bloomberg report.

Rajiv Jain’s acumen as a portfolio manager dates back to when he started off his career at Vontobel. Considered a star manager there, there is a certain boldness about how Jain goes about investments.

According to Bloomberg, he puts down huge amounts of money on individual stocks and can bail on the entire position in a heartbeat. This makes him unique in comparison to other portfolio managers.

Jain is not just unique in his approach, but has the confidence to back it up. The Bloomberg report says that Jain considers himself a “quality growth manager”, while he refers to others, without naming names, as “quote-unquote quality growth managers”.

While Jain too has had his share of mistakes, he has played a crucial role in establishing GQG as one of the world’s leading market investors. Jain is a majority stakeholder in GQG and invests most of his personal wealth in its funds.

Not your typical boss

When GQG went public in Australia in 2021, Jain pledged to invest 95 per cent of the IPO proceeds in the company and keep the money there for seven years.This makes Jain different from typical bosses at investment firms.

But there are other factors too. He does not meet with executives who run companies he’s considering investing in so he doesn’t “drink their kool-aid”; he also bans GQG employees from trading in stocks in their personal accounts and he even apologized on a conference call to GQG employees for losses they took when his bet on Russia went south last year.

For Rajiv Jain, the ability to recognize errors and change course accordingly is important in his profession and also something that his rivals lack. Giving an example, Jain told Bloomberg that they (rivals) failed to recognise that the tech stock boom was about to go bust last year.

On the other hand, he had already started cutting his tech holdings in late 2021 after making the most of the pandemic-fuelled technology rally. Jain was quoted by the Bloomberg article as saying that investing is a “game of survival” because most people won’t survive in the long run.