GLOBAL - Assets under management at BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, fell by 6% to $3.1trn (€2.4trn) in the second quarter, sending its shares down by nearly 5% today.
However, Laurence Fink, chairman and chief executive, said the company's outlook remained positive.
He said: "We continued to win a wide variety of mandates from institutional investors, including outsourcing services for insurance companies and pension plan sponsors.
"Many clients are now looking to do things related to minimising risk and putting more money to work in indexing."
Fink said this was after market sentiment changed dramatically between April and May, following problems in Europe with sovereign credit, which then "caused a deterioration in the global capital market".
The company's multi-asset AUM for the quarter was almost $150bn, with investments evenly split between institutional and retail.
While net new business for long-term products rose sharply in both the US and Asian markets, this was offset by $2.3bn worth of outflows from the EMEA region.
Fink also said recent leadership changes, which had seen a restructuring of the management team, had less to do with the merger with Barclays Global Investors than with "changes that are going on in the economic landscape".
"We can no longer have all our leadership in the US, no longer have our leadership pocketed in London," he said.
"We need our leadership to be much more spread out."
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