Blackstone provided its second-quarter numbers on Thursday, which showed assets under management exceeded $1,000 billion for the first time. Earnings before distribution amounted to $1.2 billion.
This was somewhat more than analysts’ expectations, but it was down 40 percent from the same period last year.
– Activity picks up again
President and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Gray now believes that markets have absorbed the shock of the Fed’s rate hike and that the year-long drought in the transaction market will soon end.
– Markets will return to normal, and transaction activity will pick up again. He says in an interview with: financial times.
“I have a better feeling about today’s markets than they did 12 months ago,” he adds.
Funding is finally starting to ease, Gray points out to the paper, after a difficult year in which companies in the sector were forced to downsize. Low inflation and weaker-than-expected job growth are signs that aggressive Fed rate increases are in the process of cooling the labor market.
It started with $400,000
Blackstone was founded in 1985 by current CEO Stephen Schwarzman and banker Peter Peterson with an initial capital of only $400,000. Since its New York IPO 15 years ago, Blackstone’s assets under management have increased more than tenfold and its market capitalization has risen to more than $130 billion — more than Goldman Sachs.
Today, nearly 5,000 employees manage a portfolio of hundreds of companies that, according to Morgan Stanley’s estimates, generated total annual revenues of $200 billion last year.
Led by Schwarzman, Blackstone has become, according to the Financial Times, the first major buyout fund to diversify into areas such as real estate, hedge funds and debt portfolio management for large insurance companies. Real estate is today the company’s largest business area.
Blackstone’s target group of government investment funds, pension funds and institutions has also expanded to include hundreds of thousands of individual investors and a growing number of financial institutions seeking exposure to unlisted investments.
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