Houlihan Lokey, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Houlihan Lowkey's third quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. Please note that this conference call is being recorded today, February 1st, 2024. I'll now turn the call over to the company.

Thank you, operator, and hello, everyone. By now, everyone should have access to our third quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings release, which can be found on the Houlihan-Loki website at www.hl.com in the investor relations section. Before we begin our formal remarks, we need to remind everyone that the discussion today will include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, which are usually identified by use of words such as will, expect, anticipate, should, or other similar phrases, are not guarantees of future performance. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect, and therefore, you should exercise caution when interpreting and relying on them. We refer all of you to our recent SEC filings for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact our future operating results and financial condition. We encourage investors to review our regulatory filings, including the Form 10-Q for the quarter ended December 31, 2023, when it is filed with the SEC. During today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating the company's financial performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for our financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in our earnings release and our investor presentation on the HL.com website. Hosting the call today, we have Scott Beiser, Houlihan Logie's Chief Executive Officer, and Lindsay Alley, Chief Financial Officer of the company. They will provide some opening remarks, and then we will open the call to questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Scott.

Thank you, Christopher. Welcome, everyone, to our third quarter fiscal 2024 earnings call. We ended the quarter with revenues of $511 million and adjusted earnings per share of $1.22. Revenues were up 12%, and adjusted earnings per share were up 7% compared to the same quarter last year. Our third fiscal quarter produced our first 500 million revenue quarter in two years. We've now reported two consecutive quarters of revenue increases with a 9% increase in our third fiscal quarter when compared to our second fiscal quarter. All three business segments reported their highest quarterly results for the fiscal year, and all three businesses enter our fourth fiscal quarter with continued momentum. This quarter, we closed our previously announced acquisition of Seven Mile Advisors, an IT services business investment banking firm, adding four new MDs to our corporate finance business. We also announced the pending acquisition of Triago, a private funds investment banking firm. Upon the completion of this acquisition, we believe our private funds group will be one of the few platforms with a fully integrated advisory business offering clients primary, secondary, directs, and GP advisory services on a global basis. In addition to these acquisitions, we hired four new managing directors in our corporate finance and financial and valuation advisory business this quarter. Our corporate finance business produced $311 million in revenues for the quarter. New business activity remains strong, while the overall confidence of our managing directors in closing active engagements in attracting new business continues to improve as we enter a new calendar year. While the M&A market has shown signs of steady improvements for several months, we believe that we are still well below what would be considered normal market conditions. Consequently, we expect to see continued steady improvement in our corporate finance business throughout the calendar year when compared to the same periods in the previous year. Two positive signs of improved market conditions are the strength of year-to-date results in our capital markets business and recent strength in the technology sector. Historically, our capital markets business has been a leading indicator to improving M&A market conditions. Additionally, our technology business, which experienced one of the largest revenue declines over the last two years as a result of very weak industry fundamentals, has experienced a meaningful increase in new business and transaction closings across geographies and is a significant component of backlog leading into calendar 2024. Our financial restructuring business produced quarterly revenues of $129 million, the highest since the COVID crisis. The business environment for restructuring remains very strong. New business activity has improved in the U.S. since last quarter, and we are now seeing strength in financial restructuring across all geographies. While we expect our restructuring business to remain at elevated levels for the foreseeable future, we remind everyone that our financial restructuring quarterly results can be lumpy based on the timing of when certain transactions close. Financial and valuation advisory produced $72 million in quarterly revenues, This is only slightly above last quarter's results, but similar to corporate finance, shows a consistent trend in quarterly improvements over the fiscal year. Our market-neutral service lines continue to show strong results as we add new clients globally, enabling us to expand our FBA business into new geographies. Our service lines tied to the M&A markets continue to slightly lag our M&A business, but we expect them to eventually catch up. I would like to end today's comments by celebrating the success of our three business segments with accolades similar to those I've announced for the last nine years. In calendar 2023, Houlihan Loki was ranked the number one investment banking firm globally for all M&A transactions based on transaction volume. We are again ranked as the number one investment banking firm globally for all financial restructuring transactions, both in terms of value and volume. And finally, We rank as the most active fairness opinion provider globally when measured over the last 25 years. Congratulations to every employee at Houlihan Loki who worked hard to achieve these accolades. And thank you to all our investors who, throughout the cycles, have continued to support our efforts to become a trusted advisor to our clients and a leader in investment banking worldwide. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Lindsay.