Moelis & Company

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Mollis & Company Earnings Conference Call for the first quarter of 2022. To begin, I will turn the conference over to Mr. Chet Mindell, Head of Investor Relations.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Mollis & Company's first quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. On the phone today are Ken Mollis, 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 MOLUS and companies' 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.molis.com. As many of you know, this is my last earnings call with Molis. Matt Sucroff will be my replacement, and you should contact him if you have any questions. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Joe.

Thanks, Chad. 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 adjusted revenues of $298 million in the first quarter, representing an increase of 13% over the prior year period and our largest first quarter of revenues ever. The increase in revenues was primarily attributed to growth in our M&A activity and higher average fees earned on our completed transactions. Moving to expenses, our first quarter comp ratio was 59%. largely consistent with our comp ratio for the past two years. Our first quarter non-comp ratio was 12%. This all combined to produce a quarterly pre-tax margin of 29%. Moving to taxes, our underlying corporate tax rate was 27.1% for the first quarter. Regarding capital allocation, year to date, we have repurchased approximately 2.4 million shares, totaling $115 million. Approximately 50% of the buyback was in connection with RECU tax withholding, and the other 50% of the buyback was pursuant to open market purchases. In addition, the board declared a regular quarterly dividend of 60 cents per share. As always, we remain committed to returning 100% of our excess cash. And lastly, we continue to maintain a fortress balance sheet with no funded debt. And I'll now turn the call over to Ken.