Portfolio - ETFs

Fink Says BlackRock Needs to Improve Equity ETF Market Share

by: Alexis Leondis

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

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(Bloomberg) -- BlackRock Inc.’s Laurence D. Fink, who heads the world’s largest asset manager, said his firm needs to capture a larger share of the deposits that are going into U.S. equity exchange-traded funds.

“We are not happy with our market share in the second quarter in U.S. equity ETFs,” Fink, BlackRock’s chief executive officer, said in a telephone interview today.

BlackRock today said second-quarter profit fell 11 percent as slumping markets worldwide eroded fees for overseeing client money. Assets fell 3 percent to $3.56 trillion, hurt by market declines and $29.4 billion in client redemptions, including $5.5 billion from the firm’s iShares stock ETFs.

The iShares unit, which is the world’s largest ETF provider, has more than 250 products, yet ETF flows during the second quarter were into “commoditized ETFs,” or large index products, Fink said.

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