Moelis & Company

Good afternoon and welcome to the Moelis & Company earnings conference call for the second quarter of 2021. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touchstone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. To begin, I'll turn the call over to Mr. Chet Mandell, Head of Investor Relations.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Moelis & Company's second quarter 2021 financial results conference call. On the phone today are Ken Moelis, Chairman and CEO, and Joe Simon, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to note that the remarks made on this call may contain certain forward-looking statements which are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including those identified From time to time in the risk factor section of Moelis & Company's filings with the SEC, actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated. The firm undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Our comments today include references to certain adjusted financial measures. We believe these measures, when presented together with comparable gap measures, are useful to investors to compare our results across several periods and to better understand our operating results. The reconciliation of these adjusted financial measures with the relevant GAAP financial information and other information required by Reg G is provided in the firm's earnings release, which can be found on our investor relations website at investors.moelis.com. I will now turn the call over to Joe to discuss our results.

Joe? Thanks, Chad, and good afternoon, everyone. On today's call, I'll go through our financial results, and then Ken will comment further on the business. We achieved $361 million of revenues in the second quarter, an increase of 126% over the prior year. This represents our second largest quarter of revenues ever. Our first half revenues of $625 million were up nearly 100% from the prior year period. The robust growth during the second quarter was primarily attributable to increased levels of transaction completions with particular strength in M&A. In addition, our restructuring and capital markets teams remain very active as our model truly has three powerful revenue engines. Moving to expenses, our compensation expense was accrued at 59.3%, consistent with both the prior quarter and the prior year. Our second quarter non-comp expenses were $29 million, resulting in a solid non-comp ratio of 8%. We expect our non-compensation expenses to be in the range of 33 to 34 million for the third quarter, primarily driven by anticipated increases in travel. We achieved the quarterly pre-tax margin of 33.5%, well exceeding our 25% target. Moving to taxes, our underlying corporate tax rate was 26% for the second quarter. Regarding capital allocation, the Board declared a regular quarterly dividend of $0.60 per share, an increase of 9% from the first quarter of 2021 and our second increase since the end of 2020. In addition, we repurchased approximately 400,000 shares in the open market during the second quarter. In order to continue to execute on our capital management strategy, the Board of Directors has authorized an increase of $100 million to the repurchase authorization. Including today's announcement, our current repurchase capacity stands at approximately $150 million. As always, we remain committed to returning 100% of our excess cash. And lastly, we continue to maintain a fortress balance sheet with $281 million of cash and no debt. I'll now turn the call over to Ken.