BlackRock Profits Beat Views as AUM Swell 10%

BlackRock Inc said on Wednesday that its assets under management had increased 10 percent in the third quarter.

The world's largest asset manager also reported net income of $917 million, or $5.37 per share, up 26 percent from $730 million, or $4.21 per share, a year earlier.

Excluding one-time items, earnings were $5.21 a share, beating the analysts' average estimate of $4.69, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

BlackRock ended the quarter with $4.5 trillion in assets under management. It had $28.7 billion in net inflows, up almost 4 percent from a year earlier.

Third-quarter inflows were almost evenly split between equity and fixed income funds, with $10.2 billion going into its equity funds and $11.1 billion into its fixed income funds. Multi-asset funds had $7.4 billion in inflows.

Investors pulled $80 million from BlackRock's alternative funds in the third quarter.

Sixty-two percent of new investor money went into BlackRock's iShares exchange-traded fund business, which had $18.2 billion in inflows.

Institutional investors added $5.5 billion to BlackRock's funds, and the company's retail funds had $5 billion in inflows.

(Reporting by Jessica Toonkel in New York; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)