meet Bhavook Tripathi

when you buy, go big. this is the singular philosophy that drives market investor Bhavook Tripathi. it is how he ended up holding a 35.5% stake in IT services firm R Systems. and with a stake just in one company, his net worth was close to Rs 1,381 crore at the end of the December quarter. 

the investment strategy of this little-known investor from Pune is unlike any other equity banker in the country. he chooses one investment and invests a significant chunk of money into it for the long term. 

stepping away from the concept of diversified risks, Tripathi does intense research into one company and puts all his capital into it. if he sees value in a company, he creates a huge position. 

love for ‘the one’

an engineering graduate, 49-year-old Tripathi worked in investment banking in the US for a few years before returning to India in 1994. since the family nurtured a dream of setting up a manufacturing unit, Tripathi and his father set up Sanshu Industries to offer ancillary services to auto companies. 

setting up a plant would cost around Rs 200 crore and this is when Tripathi saw potential in stock investments. 

it was the late ‘90s. Indian stock investors were obsessed with the IT sector and pumping money heavily into such companies. 

the maverick Tripathi fixed his eyes on automobile ball-bearing company FAG Precision Bearing instead. he invested money into the company when its market cap was just Rs 35 crore and exited it about seven years later. profit made? Rs 10 crore. 

Tripathi times his purchase to when a stock is out of favor. he exits the stock once the fair value is reached. 

he chose Solvay Pharma in 2006 at a time when the company was looking to sell its pharma division. investors took notice when Tripathi started buying aggressively. eventually, as this pharma firm was merged with Abbott, Tripathi exited citing the latter’s opaque management. the value of his holding in Solvay zoomed from Rs 5 crore in 2006 to Rs 59 crore in 2010.