Objectives and Approach

The Fund aims to achieve long-term capital growth on your investment. The Fund seeks to gain at least 70% of its investment exposure to equity securities (e.g. shares) of companies in Asia (excluding Japan). The Fund may invest in equities and equity-related securities, fixed income (FI) securities (such as bonds), money market instruments (MMIs) (debt securities with short-term maturities), deposits and cash. The FI securities and MMIs may be issued by governments, government agencies, companies and supranationals and will be investment grade (i.e. meet a specified level of credit worthiness) at the time of purchase. The Fund uses quantitative (i.e. mathematical or statistical) models to achieve a rule based approach to select stocks, based on their expected contribution to portfolio returns. Stocks are selected from a broad universe of equities and ranked broadly according to three categories: fundamental information about the relevant company (such as financial reports), market sentiment towards the company’s stock and general economic themes (such as interest rates) that the stock may be exposed. The Fund may invest in American Depository Receipts (ADRs) and Global Depositary Receipts (GDRs), listed or traded on stock exchanges and regulated markets outside Asia. ADRs and GDRs are investments issued by financial institutions which give exposure to underlying equity securities. The investment manager (IM) will use financial derivative instruments (FDIs) (including synthetic short positions where the Fund uses an FDI to benefit from the sale of an asset it does not physically own with the aim of buying it later at a lower price to secure a profit). The IM will, in addition to the investment criteria set out above, take into account certain environmental, social and governance-related (ESG) characteristics when selecting the securities to be held directly by the Fund and, in doing so, may use data provided by external ESG research providers and proprietary models. For further details please refer to the BlackRock website at https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/literature/publication/blackrock-baseline-screens-in-europe-middleeast-and-africa.pdf The Fund may obtain indirect exposure (through, including but not limited to, FDIs) to securities which may not satisfy these ESG criteria. The Fund is actively managed and the IM has discretion to select the Fund's investments. The IM will refer to the MSCI AC Asia ex Japan Index (the Index) when constructing the Fund’s portfolio, and also for risk management purposes to ensure that the active risk (i.e. degree of deviation from the index) taken by the Fund remains appropriate given the Fund’s investment objective and policy. The IM is not bound by the components or weighting of the Index and may use its discretion to invest in securities not included in the Index. The geographical scope of the investment objective and policy may have the effect of limiting the extent to which the portfolio holdings will deviate from the Index. The Index should be used by investors to compare the performance of the Fund. Recommendation: This Fund may not be appropriate for short-term investment.