In China, he says, the middle class was something like 100 million people seven or eight years ago and that number has gone up four- or fivefold. “Just the number of people who are suddenly earning $30,000, $50,000 a year to have a Westernized lifestyle … that’s come quite quickly. … So [there’s] been huge growth in outbound tourism and health care, insurance, use of internet, private education, all these kinds of things.”

India is set to benefit from great demographics as well, he says. “If you look at something like India you’ve got very, very strong population growth over the next 20 years or so on the U.N. estimates from 2015 to 2035. It’s just under 25% working age population growth. You contrast that with most of Western Europe and Japan and even the Eastern European countries, you have something like a 15% contraction.”

Marshall-Lee says a big trend for his firm has been electric vehicles. Worldwide regulations are going to force automakers to update their fleets, he says, and over the long term, lithium battery hybrid cars are going to make up bigger parts of those fleets. For that reason, his fund has bought in this space since 2011, investing in lithium producers in Latin America and battery makers in Korea, for instance.

Nick Niziolek, the co-CIO, and head of international and global strategies at Calamos Investments, points to secular growth opportunities in the internet, fintech and consumer themes. Calamos is very overweight in China and India, he says. In the firm’s Evolving World Growth Strategy, the India allocation rose close to 20% toward the end of 2017, which he said is more than two times the benchmark.

He says that emerging markets have leapfrogged developed markets when it comes to some things like digital currencies. When he was in China last year, he saw a street musician take donations not with a bucket but with a QR code.

He points to idiosyncratic small- and mid-cap investments that helped his funds last year. One big winner was Vakrangee, a banking, insurance and e-commerce company that operates a kiosk system throughout India. “It’s a kiosk that you can open up basically in any storefront and it allows mom-and-pop business to allow for government services to be completed there, do some banking functions. And they have a partnership with Amazon, so you can have your package picked up there. And given the infrastructure in India, that’s actually pretty important.” The company reportedly saw 40% earnings growth in 2017.

He also points to Asian fintech holding Ping An, an insurance company that’s overweight in the Calamos fund. The company is using mobile technology data about its users to price risk for things like the underwriting of insurance policies. “They’ve been able to utilize your smartphone device to help track driving habits and how often you speed, how often you start and stop.”

Calamos is also exposed to burgeoning financial services in India. It’s overweight in housing finance in India and has some consumer and corporate banks, mutual funds and brokerages, Niziolek says.

Charlie Wilson, a co-portfolio manager on the Thornburg Developing World Fund, says that his fund is still concentrated in China, where it has a third of its holdings, and India, where it has a one-tenth. He mentions China Unicom, a state-owned enterprise that the government is now allowing to be infused with private capital as part of its reforms for mixed ownership. The new co-owners include Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu, which will reportedly help China Unicom build out data, cloud and 5G developments.

Rishikesh Patel, the co-portfolio manager of the BMO LGM Emerging Markets Equity Fund, says that his team doesn’t pay much attention to macroeconomic factors. Instead, they pick stocks from the bottom up and, for them, the structural themes for emerging markets aren’t changing.