Houlihan Lokey, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Houlihan Loki's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 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, May 7, 2025. I will now turn the call over to the company.

Thank you, Operator, and hello, everyone. By now, everyone should have access to our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 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-K for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025, 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. And 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 Adelson, Houlihan Loki's Chief Executive Officer and Lindsay Alley, Chief Financial Officer. 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 fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 earnings call. We ended the quarter with revenues of $666 million and adjusted earnings per share of $1.96. Revenues for the quarter were up 28% and adjusted earnings per share were up 54% compared to the same quarter last year. We ended the fiscal year 2025 with $2.4 billion in revenues, the highest annual revenue in the firm's history, up 25% versus last year. and surpassing our high water revenue mark in fiscal year 2022. Both financial restructuring and financial and valuation advisory produce record revenues for the year. And our corporate finance business had its second best year ever. A significant driver of our growth has been our ability to execute on acquisitions. This year was our most active year ever, closing three acquisitions that altogether expanded our industry, geographic, and product reach. Acquisitions continue to be an important component of our overall growth strategy, and we're pleased with how well they are performing, demonstrating the success of our strategy. Key indicators in our corporate finance business outside the U.S. continue to move upward in the fourth quarter. The average size of our transactions and the average transaction fee continue to grow, and the quality of our senior hires and, importantly, our overall brand perception strengthened. Finally, we had a record year in our capital markets business, now rebranded as Capital Solutions to better reflect the breadth of our offerings. This business is a strategic and expanding part of corporate finance, significantly enhancing our platform, with diversified high growth and less volatile revenues. Looking back at the fourth quarter, all three of our business lines performed well, particularly in a challenging economic environment. Corporate finance continued to see improving metrics in the fourth quarter, while our cyclical service lines in FDA also performed well in a volatile market. Our financial restructuring business had a strong fourth quarter to close the year, reinforcing our view that fiscal year 2026 could also see elevated revenues in financial restructuring. We hired four managing directors in the fourth quarter, bringing our total hired and acquired for the fiscal year to 37. And we are also pleased to announce that we have promoted 16 colleagues to managing director in our current quarter. I would like to congratulate all our new partners and promotes and wish them success in the coming years. I'm incredibly proud that we delivered strong results in a market environment like this. These results are a testament to our business strategy, our diversified business model, and the perseverance of our colleagues around the globe. We begin the new fiscal year with momentum across all our product lines. even as the early weeks have been marked by turmoil in global markets and the economy. And although current volatility makes meaningful forecasts for the weeks and months ahead more difficult, our business model is built to handle volatile market conditions like what we are experiencing today. There will be winners and losers in this market environment, and our business model is set up to advise both. I would like to thank our more than 2,700 employees for continuing to deliver excellence to our clients and to one another, as well as our clients and our shareholders who continue to support us with confidence as we are committed to building the best investment banking advisory business in the world. And with that, I will turn the call over to Lindsey.