NEW YORK, February 8 (FinanceEnquiry.com) - BlackRock-managed (NYSE: BLK) Exchange-Traded Funds family, iShares, has been the leader in the U.S. ETF industry, with a hold of over 40 percent of the U.S. market. However, partially due to cost efficient products of its competitors, iShares is losing a hold on the market.

As per the data of the ETF Industry Association, last year, Vanguard headed all ETF issuers with nearly $36 billion in cash inflows, closely topping the $28.8 billion that iShares took in. Though, the difference in inflows between the two was linked to a small group of ETFs connected to identical indexes, the cheaper Vanguard funds attracted significantly more interest of the investors as compared to iShares ETFs.

iShares, which has lost ground to more cost efficient ETFs in 2011, has come out again in 2012 with an attention on capturing the market share from existing funds by using lower costs as one of the main attractions. In2012, so far, iShares has been tremendously active on the product development front and has already launched 18 new funds. Many of the latest add-ons to its roster have been first-to-market products, however most of them will be competing with existing ETFs on the market on the basis of cost efficiency.