Besides the big demand and low yield, there’s another thing money managers find remarkable about Saudi Aramco’s $12 billion bond sale: the way emerging markets absorbed such a mega deal without breaking a sweat.

The international debut of the world’s most profitable company took dollar-bond sales by emerging-market borrowers this year to $189.4 billion, a shade under an all-time record for the period. But the secondary market showed no nervousness ahead of the new supply, rallying for a seventh time in eight days and extending the best start to a year in a decade.

While, in the past, such a pace of new-bond sales would have prompted investors to dump emerging-market debt on oversupply concerns, the Aramco deal is unlikely to have the same impact, according to money managers including Ashmore Group Plc and Pinebridge Investments. Having tripled in size over seven years, the dollar-debt market in developing nations can absorb inflows more easily. And the hunt for higher yields amid central-bank dovishness may keep the rally going.

“This is a drop in the ocean,” Jan Dehn, the head of research at Ashmore in London, said, referring to year-to-date bond sales by emerging-market borrowers. “Emerging-market bonds are fundamentally mispriced as yields are still too high relative to Treasuries. The rally is relatively in early stages.”

This year’s borrowings by both sovereign and corporate issuers in developing nations mark a 45 percent increase from $120 billion in the corresponding period in 2012. Since then, the market capitalization of the Bloomberg Barclays EM USD Aggregate Total Return Index nearly tripled to $2 trillion. That’s shrunk the proportion of new sales to market size by half.

The gauge has rallied 5.7 percent since December, the best showing for this time of the year since 2009, taking the average spread over Treasuries down 58 basis points to 285. The U.S. dollar’s strength since April last year has added to the gains, helping the index outperform a similar measure of local-currency bonds.

The significance of the Aramco deal to emerging markets was how it elicited interest from a broader base of investors beyond the dedicated emerging-market money managers, said Anders Faergemann, a senior money manager at Pinebridge Investments in London. That should encourage other issuers from the Gulf Cooperation Council to tap the market this year, he said.

“We had a lot of U.S. investors and Asian investors all coming into the same book,” he said. “If Aramco had been in a non-emerging-market country, the yield could have come in even tighter.”

The outlook for emerging-market bonds would be dictated by global macro factors rather than any concern of oversupply from new bonds, he said. If signs emerge that China’s economic slowdown has bottomed out and if central banks including the Federal Reserve stay accommodative, the case for riskier assets will continue, Faergemann said.