Find the new article by Jérôme CABY, Professor at the Sorbonne Business School.
The room for maneuver at BlackRock, one of the most famous investment funds with a contested business, remains far more limited than the record amounts of assets the company manages might suggest. Find out why.
BlackRock is the world's number 1 asset manager: $10,646 billion at the end of June 2024, a record. The wealth generated in 2023 in France, by way of comparison, was 2,806 billion euros: that's saying something. BlackRock offers and invests in the whole range of investments, from equities and bonds to alternative products, although the company is best known for its ETF offering (exchanged-traded funds, low-cost investment products that duplicate stock market indices), with $3,886 billion in assets under management at the end of June 2024.
Despite everything, BlackRock is not the owner of these funds: the company acts on behalf of others, those who invest their money and decide which type of support they wish to position themselves in. Its own sales, mainly made up of management fees for these assets, are "only" $18.6 billion, for a profit of $5.5 billion in 2023.