The fund provides full access to dollar-denominated, investment grade and high yield bonds issued by corporations based in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
BlackRock iShares Fixed Income Strategy head Matthew Tucker said that the investors are becoming more sophisticated in how they build fixed income portfolios.
"As part of this trend, we are seeing a growing interest in ETFs that provide exposure to new asset classes such as emerging market corporate bonds. For the first time, investors are able to directly invest in the debt of companies from emerging markets with an index-based ETF," Tucker said.
"Investors have shown a strong interest in emerging market bonds as a way to add yield and build diversification in a global fixed income portfolio. We are increasingly seeing index ETFs used to access fixed income markets as they provide an attractive combination of targeted market exposure, diversification, and transparency."
According to a study, the emerging markets corporate debt market has witnessed an eight-time increase in issuance in the last ten years, and now vying the size of the dollar-denominated emerging markets sovereign debt market.
BlackRock’s AUM was $3.345 trillion as of 30 September 2011, and the firm offers separate accounts, mutual funds, iShares (exchange-traded funds) and other pooled investment vehicles.
