BlackRock Planning to Cut 400 Jobs in Coming Weeks

BlackRock Inc , the world's largest asset manager, is about to slash around 400 jobs, or 3 percent of its total workforce, Bloomberg reported.

The firing will be announced in the coming weeks, but the firm will still continue to hire in key areas and expects to end the year with a higher headcount, Bloomberg reported.

The layoffs are the largest scale ever which has approximately 13,000 employees around the world. The company had around $4.645 trillion in assets under management as of Dec. 31.

In the meantime, Franklin Resources Inc. said in its latest quarterly earnings that it would implement buyouts for about 300 of its 9,400 employees.

BlackRock CEO, Laurence D. Fink, said earlier this year that as the company is going through the volatile nature of the markets, several companies could cut jobs by the middle of the first quarter.

Here's what he said in a January interview with CNBC:

Having a market decline like this in the first couple of weeks of the year really, in my mind, puts a negativity across the economy. A negativity to every CEO who is looking at his or her stock price. A negativity related to business and the forward thinking about businesses. I actually believe you're going to start seeing more layoffs in the middle part of the first quarter, definitely the second quarter because of this. If we don't see some swift rebound — and as I said I think we're going to have probably more pain before we have that lift — but I do believe by the second half of the year the markets going to be higher.

BlackRock reported a lower-than-expected profit for the fourth quarter as costs rose 5 percent because of higher headcount, performance fees and other expenses.

BlackRock was founded in 1988 by Larry Fink, Robert S. Kapito, Susan Wagner, Barbara Novick, Ben Golub, Hugh Frater, Ralph Schlosstein, and Keith Anderson to provide institutional clients with asset management services from a risk management perspective.