Yahoo Finance Blackstone Inc. (NYSE:BX) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
Blackstone Inc. (NYSE:BX) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript April 18, 2024
Blackstone Inc. isn't one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good day. And welcome to the Blackstone First Quarter 2024 Investor Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode [Operator Instructions]. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Weston Tucker, Head of Shareholder Relations. Please go ahead.
Weston Tucker: Thanks, Katie, and good morning, and welcome to Blackstone's first quarter conference call. Joining today are Steve Schwarzman, Chairman and CEO; Jon Gray, President and Chief Operating Officer; and Michael Chae, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier this morning, we issued a press and slide presentation, which are available on our Web site. We expect to filed our 10-Q report in a few weeks. I'd like to remind you that today's call may include forward looking-statements, which are uncertain and may differ from actual results materially. We do not undertake any duty to update these statements. For discussion of some of the factors that could affect results, please see the risk factors section of our 10-K. We'll also refer to certain non-GAAP measures and you'll find reconciliations in the press release on the shareholders page of our Web site.
Also note that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any Blackstone fund. This audiocast is copyrighted material of Blackstone and may not be duplicated without consent. So on results quickly, we reported GAAP net income for the quarter of $1.6 billion, distributable earnings were $1.3 billion or $0.98 per common share and we declared a dividend of $0.83, which will be paid to holders of record as of April 29th. With that, I'll turn the call over to Steve.
Steve Schwarzman: Good morning, and thank you for joining our call. Blackstone reported strong results for the first quarter of 2024, including healthy distributable earnings of $1.3 billion as Weston mentioned, underpinned by the highest fee related earnings in six quarters. On our January earnings call, following a volatile multi-year period for global markets, we noted an improving external environment and shared our view that 2023 would be the cyclical bottom for our firm. While changing market conditions take time to translate to financial results, including realizations and performance revenues, we are seeing positive momentum across many key forward indicators at our firm. Inflows were $34 billion in the first quarter and $87 billion over the past two quarters.
We invested $25 billion in quarter one and $56 billion in the past two quarters with a strengthening pipeline of new commitments. We’re planting the seeds of future value and what we believe is a favorable time for deployment. At the same time, our fundraising in the Private Wealth channel meaningfully accelerated in the first quarter. Sales for our perpetual life vehicles increased more than 80% from the fourth quarter to $6.6 billion. We've stated before that short term movements in stock and bond markets impact capital flows in this channel. But ultimately, flows follow performance as well as innovation as we're seeing now. We've delivered 10.5% net returns annually for BREIT's largest share class over more than seven years and 10% for BCRED over three plus years.
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