Alternative asset manager Blue Owl posted a higher second-quarter profit on Thursday, driven by its fee-related earnings and growth in assets under management to US$319 billion. Adjusted distributable earnings per share came in at 22 cents for the three months ended June 30, compared with 21 cents a year earlier. The company has sought to move past the private credit turmoil that rattled the sector earlier this year by highlighting the breadth of its business beyond direct lending - spanning investments in data centers and related infrastructure, real estate and stakes in other asset managers - as evidence that its earnings are less reliant on any single asset class. “Blue Owl’s ongoing growth in the second quarter reflects the strong investment performance we continue to generate across strategies and the diversification of our business across platforms and geographies,” Co-CEOs Doug Ostrover and Marc Lipschultz said in a statement. New capital commitments of US$7.8 billion in the quarter were close to half the US$13.9 billion it raised in the same period a year earlier. New money from private wealth, an investor group that has been a key driver of Blue Owl’s growth, was US$1.7 billion versus US$4.4 billion in the year-ago quarter. The stock was volatile after the results, swinging between gains and losses. It was last down 1 per cent in premarket trading. Blue Owl’s AUM increased 12 per cent in the second quarter over the same period in the prior year. A rebound in financial markets has lifted AUM across the industry, as investors continued to embrace risk despite heightened market volatility. Its fee-related earnings came in at 25 cents per adjusted share in the three months ended June 30. That compares with 23 cents per share a year earlier. DIRECT LENDING IN FOCUS The private credit sell-off sparked by fears that AI would fundamentally reshape software and technology business models has subsided in recent months, but retail investors have continued to request redemptions from funds that gave them access to rarely-traded loans. Within Blue Owl’s credit platform, direct lending originations were US$3.6 billion in the second quarter. Deployment was US$600 million. A key part of the private credit market, direct lending involves asset managers making loans directly to companies outside traditional banks to finance buyouts, growth and refinancing. The business has faced heightened investor scrutiny this year. Still, several industry executives have dismissed fears of broader contagion, arguing that credit stress is limited to isolated cases and that market sentiment has been driven more by negative headlines than deteriorating fundamentals. The firm’s own shares became a proxy for market jitters around private credit and have lost around 36 per cent of their value this year. Earlier this month, the company maintained a 5 per cent quarterly withdrawal limit for two of its private credit funds as redemption requests remained substantially above the cap despite falling by a few percentage points in the second quarter. For alternative asset managers, fundraising is a critical measure of business momentum, signaling both investor confidence and the industry’s ability to generate future management fees and investment income. Total equity fundraise was US$7.6 billion, with US$1.8 billion coming from the company’s credit platform and US$4.4 billion from real assets. (Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru and Isla Binnie in New York; Editing by Devika Syamnath)
