Houlihan Lokey, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Houlihan Loki fiscal year and fourth quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to the company. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and hello, everyone. By now, everyone should have access to our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2026 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, 2026, 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 non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered an isolation from, as a substitute for, or as more important than the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP. In addition, These non-GAAP measures have limitations in that they do not reflect all the items associated with the company's results of operations as determined 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 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.

We ended fiscal year 2026 with a record $2.6 billion in revenue, up 10% versus last year, and adjusted EPS of $7.56, up 20% versus last year. Both corporate finance and financial valuation and advisory produced record revenues for the year, and our financial restructuring business had one of the strongest years on record. Delivering these results against the backdrop of significant geopolitical uncertainty and macroeconomic pressures underscores the strength and resilience of our business. Since we went public 10 years ago, we have reported annual revenue growth in nine of the 10 years. We ended the fourth quarter with revenues of $636 million and adjusted earnings per share of $1.63. It is worth highlighting that our CF and FBA businesses each produce their highest fourth quarter revenues ever. Our quarterly results are typically more volatile than our annual results due to both external macro events and the timing of revenues. In FR, our fourth quarter results were impacted as the closing of two larger transactions extended beyond the quarter end, while the growth in our fourth quarter results in CF and FBA were impacted by recent external market disruptions, including renewed geopolitical uncertainty from the conflict in the Middle East, and market volatility affecting the software sector. Notwithstanding the turbulence exhibited in the marketplace over the last few months, our business is in the best shape in its history. We have a record level of backlog and pipeline. We have a record number of managing directors, and we have a record number of corporate acquisition opportunities in various stages of potential completion. In the fourth quarter, CF continued to see solid backlog growth and improved transaction metrics across most of our industry groups, technology being an exception. In addition, CF revenues outside the U.S. grew significantly faster than U.S. revenues in both the fourth quarter and fiscal year. Capital Solutions performed well in fiscal year 2026, and we enter year fiscal 2027 with strong backlog and high expectations for those services. Segments of our FBA business saw the same disruption from macro events in the fourth quarter, while others did not. But momentum for that business has returned to more normal levels, and we expect growth in fiscal year 2027. In FR, our expectations for fiscal year 2027 have improved. We're seeing multiple tailwinds, widening credit spreads, dislocation in private credit and the software sector, and energy volatility. These factors are driving increased activity levels, including several notable recent wins, leading to higher expectations for fiscal year 2027. Based on these dynamics, we expect this business to continue to perform at elevated levels in fiscal year 2027. We successfully closed two previously announced transactions in the fourth quarter, welcoming new colleagues from Odair Partners and Mellom Capital. Initially, we hired four managing directors in the quarter, bringing our total hired and acquired for the fiscal year to 33. We are also pleased to announce that we promoted 25 colleagues to managing director in the first quarter of fiscal year 2027. I would like to congratulate our new partners and recent promotes and wish them great success in the years to come. As we enter fiscal year 2027, our diversified business model positions us well to navigate whatever market conditions emerge. This diversification has consistently enabled us to perform through volatile periods, and we believe that advantage remains as strong as ever. And our global workforce continues to be the key differentiator. We recognize with gratitude the strength of our talented workforce now more geographically diverse and with a wider range of expertise and specialties than ever before we continue to see a strong hiring market for senior talent on the m a front our acquisition pipeline is as active as it has ever been with no shortage of compelling opportunities to further strengthen our platform I would like to thank our more than 2700 employees for continuing to deliver excellence to our clients and to one another. I would also like to thank our clients and shareholders who continue to entrust us on our journey of building the best investment banking advisory business in the world. And with that, I will turn it over to Lindsay.