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Rating:Three Things to Know From BlackRock's Q2 2013 Earnings Not Rated 0.0 Email Routing List Email & Route  Print Print
Thursday, August 15, 2013

Three Things to Know From BlackRock's Q2 2013 Earnings

Reported by Casey Quinlan

BlackRock [profile] posted second quarter earnings of $4.15 a share, above the analyst consensus of $3.82 according to Zacks Consensus Estimate. It also surpassed the 2012 second quarter earnings of $3.10 a share. Total revenue came in at $2.48 billion, up 11 percent from last year's second quarter, above the Zacks analyst estimate.

Net inflows came to $5.07 million for retail and $1.3 million for institutional active funds, with $6.4 million for institutional index funds. Total institutional inflows came to $7.7 million.

MFWire found three important points to note from Seeking Alpha's transcript of BlackRock's earnings call.

POINT 1: Unconstrained bond fund fees are higher than constrained, but that may change as those funds see more growth.

POINT 2: BlackRock is seeing more fixed income specialists using bond ETFs in their portfolios.

POINT 3: CEO Larry Fink has not seen a dramatic shift from passive into active.

To elaborate more on each of those points:

POINT 1: Unconstrained bond fund fees are higher than constrained, but that may change as those funds see more growth.
Michael Carrier of Bank of America Merrill Lynch: Larry, just one question on the fixed income business. You gave a lot of detail. Just in terms of BlackRock, how you guys are setup from a fixed income product mix, what's your offering when you look at the mix of, say, like the core products versus the -- what you characterize as either the alternative or the flex products? And then also just from like a fee perspective. If we continue to see more of that shift over time, what tends to be the fee rate in those products versus some of the more core products?

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: On the unconstrained type of product, the margins are -- or the fees are higher than our core products, but I won't say dramatically higher. And as we see more and more growth in that, obviously, we'll look to change that. But right now, the fees are higher than our core products. And as I said for the -- our 1- and 3-year period of time after fees, we've outperformed our peers in that. So that's one positive thing. We're going to have a lot of clients who are not going to be able to move out of core.

And we still -- we have great performance in our core offerings also. It is my view that more clients should be moving more towards more the unconstrained type of products, and I do believe you're going to see more and more investors move in that. Let me just also add, 2/3 of our fixed income assets are held by institutional clients, and they're generally slower in terms of movement.
POINT 2: BlackRock is seeing more fixed income specialists using bond ETFs in their portfolios.
Marc Irizarry of Goldman Sachs: So just following up on fixed income allocations from institutions, just in terms of going from maybe core to non-core products, how are fixed income ETFs playing into those discussions? And just following on, on some of the discussions around the -- what sounds like sort of market dislocations, if you will, that were temporary versus sort of tracking our long-term for fixed income. Maybe you could talk about sort of the market share opportunity?

Global head of iShares, Mark Weidman: Marc, there are 2 things, I think, implicit in your question. Let me address them separately. The first is about growing adoption by what I would call fixed income specialists of fixed income ETFs. So historically, the users of fixed income ETFs have been wealth managers and asset allocators. I call them generalist investors. And that's where the bulk even today of our fixed income ETF holdings are.

What's the big transformation that's occurring is we're seeing fixed income specialists who control, I don't know, 98%, 99% of the global fixed income assets, actually starting to use fixed income ETFs in their portfolios. For liquidity purposes, they're using them for tactical positioning. It's our aspiration with the iSharesBond launch that we actually penetrate beyond the tactical position into longer buy-and-hold segments, whether they'd be an insurance, or bank, or corporate balance sheet, or individuals around the world. So that's the broad trend, and we see it every day.
POINT 3: CEO Larry Fink has not seen a dramatic shift from passive into active.
Irizarry: Okay. And then if you can just give some color on your EM -- on active EM business both in equity and debt. Obviously, we saw -- we've seen a pretty good bout of volatility here. Are you sensing or seeing from your clients any change in thinking about being active in EM versus passive in their allocations toward EM?

Fink: No, I think that those are who are -- a core group of our investors believe that active management EM is part of their core philosophy, and this is why we've been so aggressive in building our EM fixed income team and our EM equity team. And EM and also, as I suggested, our EM alternatives. What we did, we have a $500 million win in our EM fixed income team. This is on the active side.

As I talked about Andrew Swan in terms of his outperformance in a component of that. But there are another core group of investors, and some of them, official institutions. They're investing in EM principally through a beta product. And so our job, as I've said for many quarters, is to provide an active solution and a beta solution. But Marc, I have not seen any dramatic shift out of beta into active or vice versa. I think those who are -- who believe in active will continue to invest in active, and those who believe in -- who want exposure and they're not as concerned about excess performance they're going to go into beta.
See Seeking Alpha's earnings call transcript of BlackRock's earnings call and the earnings release for more on how BlackRock is doing.  

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