Updated, 7:51 p.m. | The private equity company Kohlberg Kravis Roberts is taking full advantage of robust financial markets by selling its holdings.
That strategy resulted in a bountiful second quarter for K.K.R., which said on Thursday that profit — based on a pretax measure known as economic net income, which includes unrealized investment gains — was $501.6 million, three and a half times what it reported in the period a year earlier.
After taxes, the profit was 62 cents a share, exceeding the estimate of 50 cents by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.
With the stock market on a tear, K.K.R. sold shares in two companies it acquired with other investors during the height of the buyout boom that preceded the financial crisis: HCA Holdings, the hospital operator, and NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch company. In addition, K.K.R. completed the $5.8 billion sale of Oriental Brewery of South Korea to Anheuser-Busch InBev, for a return of more than five times the capital it invested in 2009.
In a large deal by its real estate unit, K.K.R. sold a stake in Sunrise Senior Living, a chain of assisted-living homes, for a fivefold return on its investment. The company also sold the Spanish aviation services company Avincis for $1.5 billion to the Babcock International Group, a British engineering services company.
Private equity firms across the industry are rushing to sell a range of assets, creating gains that may not be replicable in the future. The downside of soaring stock markets is that new investments become much more expensive, creating a challenge for buyout investors seeking the best bargains.
For now, however, K.K.R. is reaping the benefits. Reflecting the shower of cash, K.K.R. said its distributable earnings — a measure of cash that can be given to shareholders — were $701 million in the quarter, 74 percent higher than in the year-earlier period. Realized carried interest, or the firm’s cut of the cash earnings, doubled from the second quarter of 2013.
K.K.R. announced a dividend of 67 cents a share. Roughly a third of that money came from the Oriental Brewery sale.
“Our realization activity in the second quarter drove the highest cash carry and total distributable earnings we’ve reported since going public,” Henry R. Kravis and George R. Roberts, the co-chief executives, said in a statement. K.K.R. listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2010.
As it made new investments, K.K.R. looked far and wide for deals. The company made its first direct investment in Brazil, buying a data center business called Aceco. It also made its first African deal, acquiring a stake in Afriflora, an Ethiopian company that grows roses.
While K.K.R. sold a brewery in Asia, it invested in a pork producer. The company, with other investors, acquired a stake in Cofco Meat of China.
K.K.R. reported that its assets under management had declined slightly, to $98 billion, as of June 30, from $102.3 billion at the end of March. The company said this was in large part a result of the acquisition of its debt-trading affiliate, KKR Financial Holdings. That deal, which closed in the quarter, moved assets that had been externally managed onto K.K.R.’s balance sheet.
The decline in assets under management was also partly a result of the bankruptcy filing of Energy Future Holdings, the long-suffering Texas utility that K.K.R. and other investors bought for $45 billion in 2007.
K.K.R. and its rivals prefer to use nonstandard metrics to report earnings. According to generally accepted accounting principles, K.K.R. reported profit of $178.2 million, compared with $15.1 million a year earlier.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the amount K.K.R. earned in the second quarter of 2013 based on generally accepted accounting principles. It was $15.1 million, not $15.1 billion.