Emerging Global Advisors’ consumer-focused emerging markets exchange-traded fund (ETF), the EGShares Emerging Markets Consumer ETF (ECON), is to celebrate its third anniversary this month.

McKinsey & Co described emerging market consumers as “the biggest growth opportunity in the history of capitalism”.

The fund, which launched on the NYSE in September 2010, is linked to the Dow Jones Emerging Markets Consumer Titans 30 Index and has more than $1 billion in assets under management, making it Emerging Global Advisors’ largest fund.

The Dow Jones Emerging Markets Consumer Titans 30 Index was created to measure the stock performance of 30 leading emerging market companies in the consumer goods and consumer services industries as defined by the Industry Classification Benchmark. Stocks are selected to the index based on rankings by float-adjusted market capitalisation, revenue and net profit.

Emerging market consumers do most of their business with familiar local or regional brands, and tend to have less affinity for developed world brands. The fund thus provides exposure to these consumers – almost all of the revenues of the underlying companies are derived from emerging market sales, providing truer exposure to this theme.

This theme has been described by McKinsey & Co, the management consultants, as “the biggest growth opportunity in the history of capitalism”. McKinsey & Co estimate that domestic emerging markets spending will reach $30 trillion annually by 2025 and that emerging market consumers will become the dominant force in the global economy.

Commenting, Marten Hoekstra, CEO of Emerging Global Advisors, said: “The sectors that benefit most from emerging market demographics trends tend to be underrepresented in conventional, broad-based emerging market benchmark indices, which are usually dominated by export sectors and banks. Emerging market consumer demand represents a key theme for investors and ECON is the largest and longest standing ETF to obtain that exposure.”

Since its launch, the Dow Jones Emerging Markets Consumer Titans 30 Index  has comfortably outperformed the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, delivering an annualised return of 11.44% compared to -0.91% for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index. Year to date, the Dow Jones index is down 1.38% compared to -9.57% for the MSCI index.

With performance like this it’s no surprise the fund has bucked the trend in terms of asset flows. So far this year it has netted over $367 million in net new assets at a time when emerging market equity ETF assets overall have suffered more than $11.6 billion in net outflows.