Brahmal Vasudevan has had a brilliant career so far. He is a Sri Lankan Tamil who grew up in Malaysia. He did his MBA from Harvard where he met Ashish Dhawan. Ashish Dhawan set up ChrysCapital and Brahmal joined him in that venture. Together, they found a number of top quality stocks which propelled ChrysCapital to the top of the league. ChrysCapital’s AUM surged from $60M to $2B under Brahmal’s watch.
(Incidentally, there is a nice story of how Ashish Dhawan set up ChrysCapital in Outlook Business. The article corroborates the hypothesis that my colleague, Meera, propounded that while Ashish is a brilliant deal maker, he is a poor stock picker. His own personal portfolio of flop stocks testifies to this fact.)
After 11 years with ChrysCapital & Ashish Dhawan, Brahmal Vasudevan decided to strike it on his own in 2011 and set up Creador. He had no problem raising $130M from big-ticket investors in Malaysia (his home town) and Indonesia.
Creador’s first stock pick was Cholamandalam Investment and Finance, the blue chip NBFC of the Murugappa group. In fact, Creador and Renuka Ramnath’s Multiples Equity invested at the same time in Cholamandalam. Both, Renuka & Bhramal, invested Rs. 106 crore each in Chola in February 2012 at Rs. 160 per share.
The investment in Chola has worked out very well because the stock has given an absolute return of 74%.
Creador’s second stock is Repco Home Finance. It bought 46,39,434 shares (then 9.9%, now 7.46%) in February 2013 prior to the IPO for Rs. 72.40 crore. This means Creador paid a throwaway price of Rs. 156 per share.
This investment has also worked out very well with the stock giving a 100% return at the CMP of Rs. 329.
Repco Home Finance’s future is very bright. It qualifies as a powerhouse stock. Basant Maheshwari of Basant Top 10 recently announced that Repco was his latest recommended favourite multibagger stock.
Creador’s third and latest stock pick is Somany Ceramics. VCC has reported that Creador will buy 43.4 lakh shares (11% stake) in Somany Ceramics for Rs. 50 crore/ $8M at the price of Rs. 115 per share.
Interestingly, Somany Ceramics first came to light when Microsec put a strong BUY on it in September 2012 when the stock was languishing at Rs. 44. At today’s CMP of Rs. 121, Microsec’s lucky followers are looking at a gain of 175% in 15 months. It is a testimony to Microsec‘s stock picking skills that they were able to home in on a winning stock so early.
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