Perella Weinberg Partners

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Perella Weinberg Partners second quarter 2021 earnings call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and 0. I would now like to turn the conference over to Taylor Reinhart, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and welcome to our second quarter 2021 earnings call. Joining me today are Peter Weinberg, Chief Executive Officer, and Gary Barancic, Chief Financial Officer. A replay of this call will be available through the Investors page of the company's website approximately two hours following the conclusion of this live broadcast through August 26, 2021. For those who listened to the rebroadcast of this presentation, we remind you that the remarks made herein are as of today, August 12, 2021, and have not been updated subsequent to the initial earnings call. Before we begin, I'd like to note that this call may contain forward-looking statements, including PWP's expectations of future financial and business performance and conditions and industry outlook. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements and are not guarantees of future events or performance. Please refer to PWP's most recent SEC filing for discussion of certain of these risks in the city. Forward-looking statements are based on our current beliefs and expectations, and the firm undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. During the call, there will also be a discussion of some metrics, which are non-GAAP financial measures, which management believes are relevant in assessing the financial performance of the business. PWP has reconciled these items to the most comparable gap measures in the press release filed with today's Form 8K, which can be found on the company's website. I will now turn the call over to Peter Weinberg to discuss the results.

Great. Thank you, Taylor. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us for our first earnings call as a public company. Before I begin my formal remarks, I wanted to briefly recognize those who contributed to our journey as a private partnership over the past 15 years, and also to welcome our new constituents as a public company. Many people contributed to what the firm is today, but none more than our team we have in the field right now. At all levels of the firm, I am enormously grateful for their dedication and commitment. And to the investors and analysts whom I know we will get to know quite well, Welcome. I frequently say within the firm that when we became a public company, we crossed the starting line. We will work hard to make the next 15 years as rewarding as the first 15. Now, onto my formal remarks regarding our quarter. While Gary will get into more financial detail in a minute, I am pleased to report that our firm in 2021 had a record second quarter and a record first half. Revenues for the quarter were $256 million and revenues for the first half were $425 million, resulting in a 123% increase and a 105% increase versus the respective prior period in 2020. The firm's business was active across all industry groups, geographies, and product areas. The dynamics that led to increased M&A activity in the latter half of 2020 have continued to pace in 2021. We are seeing an unprecedented level of strategic dialogue and transaction flow. And while we are cognizant of a number of market concerns, including the indigestion in the SPAC market, new antitrust regulatory developments, tax policy and inflation risk, the level of market activity continues to be very strong. While our backlog remains extremely robust, we would be cautious about simply extrapolating our record first half performance for the balance of the year. We saw an elevated level of large fee realizations in the second quarter, which made this a particularly strong quarter. Our restructuring and liability management business experienced moderate growth in the quarter relative to record levels in the back half of 2020. Overall activity in this business has been tempered by low interest rates and the wide availability of inexpensive capital. Our restructuring team has been able to pivot and focus on other corporate finance related mandates, a benefit of our flexible client-centric model. In terms of our growth through the expansion of our partner base, year to date we have added three partners from internal promotions and another six have joined or agreed to join the firm in 2021. We believe this group will add significantly to our capability and footprint, and we expect to announce more partner hires this summer and fall. We continue to see significant opportunities for growth across our platform and a plentiful supply of candidates who we believe fit not only our strategic needs, but our culture as well. So to wrap up, we feel very good about the momentum we continue to experience in the second quarter. Looking forward, we have the tailwinds of an extraordinarily active advisory market in which we operate and a strong brand presence in the industry. We believe we have a very simple, clear, client-centric growth strategy in which to operate as a public company. On that note, Gary, I'll turn it over to you.