BlackRock reported $3.561 trillion in assets under management as of Dec. 31, up 3.3% from the prior quarter and 6.4% higher than the year before.
The money manager's latest quarterly results, issued Tuesday showed market and performance-related gains of $132.1 billion, more than offsetting roughly $15 billion in net outflows for the three-month period.
BlackRock reported quarterly net inflows for long-dated strategies of $23.9 billion offset by outflows of $38.7 billion, caused by clients scaling back their exposure to the firm following its Dec. 1, 2009, acquisition of Barclays Global Investors, as well as outflows from the firm's active quantitative strategies, whose performance had struggled in recent years.
BlackRock spokeswoman Bobbie Collins declined to provide specific figures for concentration and quant-related outflows.
In a conference call Tuesday, BlackRock executives said performance for the firm's active quant strategies turned positive last year, joining a range of other active equity, fixed-income and alternative strategies in posting market-topping results.
BGI merger-related outflows, which came to roughly $120 billion for all of 2010, are now “largely behind us,” Laurence D. Fink, BlackRock's chairman and CEO, said in the conference call.
Mr. Fink said the speed of the BlackRock-BGI integration and the combined firm's earnings momentum have exceeded his management team's expectations.
Mr. Fink said a key to BlackRock's strong performance over the past year was its rejection of the idea that the economy was facing a “new normal” marked by low growth, leaving it well positioned for the more than 3% growth actually posted in 2010.
Mr. Fink conceded that a 5% organic growth rate, in terms of net inflows, was a good base-case assumption for the coming years. Even so, he said the absolute level of net inflows would be less important than the details — as clients looking to “re-risk” could well put money in products with higher fees but fewer assets.
For the latest quarter, net inflows continued to flow into passive, rather than active, strategies. According to BlackRock's earnings announcement, iShares ETF products pulled in net flows of $13.4 billion and institutional index accounts, $12 billion. Actively managed products saw net inflows of $11.7 billion, but the transfer of an $8.8 billion stable-value account to cash lowered that net active inflow to roughly $3 billion.
Still, Mr. Fink expressed confidence that investors will increasingly move to add risk during 2011, with BlackRock's strong performance and solutions-based offerings leaving the firm poised to benefit from that trend.
For the latest quarter, BlackRock reported net income of $657 million, up 19% from the prior quarter and up 157% from the year before. Revenues, meanwhile, came to $2.49 billion, up 19% from the prior quarter and up 61% from the year before.
