Excluding items, it earned $5.25 per share, beating the $4.89 estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.
Passive
Last quarter, iShares and index funds brought in all of the net money that went into the BlackRock's "long-term" products, a grouping that excludes funds where investors park cash.
BlackRock has been pushing investors to use ETFs more often and in new ways. ETFs were initially seen as devices used to track stock indexes. But BlackRock has aggressively marketed fixed-income ETFs to institutions that normally use bonds.
That approach paid off. U.S.-based bond ETFs attracted record cash last quarter, according to researcher Morningstar Inc, and iShares took in $4 in $10 of that money.
BlackRock also created a low-cost lineup of 25 "Core" ETFs for everyday investors to use to build a basic portfolio. The funds compete on price with BlackRock's most aggressive price-slashing rivals, Vanguard Group and Charles Schwab Corp.
Those 25 Core ETFs accounted for 54 percent of iShares inflows last quarter.
Yet success in that category has come at the cost of lowering fees, which BlackRock last did for Core in October.
In a sign of how high the bar is for growing in the ETF business, iShares' share of U.S. assets in that business has actually decreased to 39 percent, from a peak under BlackRock ownership of 47 percent. BlackRock bought iShares from Barclays PLC in 2009.
Active
Last month, BlackRock said it would cut jobs and fees while relying more on computers to assemble its investment portfolios, a flurry of changes meant to jumpstart its lagging stockpicking franchise. The changes affect 11 percent of its $275 billion active stock fund business.
By BlackRock's own figures, 51 percent of assets in its traditionalist "Fundamental" active stock funds are lagging their benchmark over five years.