Moelis & Company

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to the Mullis and Company fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. To begin, I'll turn the call over to Mr. Matt Sucross.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Mullis and Company's fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results conference call. On the phone today are Navin Mamoudzadegan, CEO and co-founder, and Chris Colosano, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would 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 factors section of Molson 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.mols.com. I will now turn the call over to Navid. Thank you, Matt.

It's great to be with you all this afternoon. We close 2025 with significant momentum and enter 2026 from a position of strength underscored by elevated levels of client activity record new business generation, and the highest quality talent and breadth of expertise we've ever had. We earned record fourth quarter revenues of $488 million. And for the full year, our adjusted revenues grew 28% to 1.54 billion. Our revenues in 2025 were driven by 35% growth in M&A, a record setting year for our capital markets business, and double digit increases in both average fees and number of completed transactions. Momentum continues to build across our business. Since our last earnings call, we advised on a number of notable M&A transactions, including Netflix acquisition of Warner Brothers, Allied Gold sale to Zhijun Gold, and Ventex Biosciences sale to Eli Lilly. Outside of M&A, we advised on USA Rare Earth's transformative partnership with the US Department of Commerce, the debt restructuring of King Abdullah Economic City, and X Energy's pre-IPO convert transaction. Constructive financing markets and strong equity market performance are setting the stage for an active transaction environment in 2026. The breadth and depth of M&A activity that we saw at the end of last year is expanding and accelerating. Strategics are becoming even more active as boards gain confidence to pursue larger transformational deals to drive scale and best position themselves for rapid technological shifts. Sponsor activity is also building as valuation alignment improves and sponsors respond to growing pressure to deploy and return capital to investors. While larger cap transactions have been driving the M&A market, momentum in our pipeline gives us increasing confidence that activity will broaden across transaction sizes as the year progresses. In capital markets, our team is benefiting from increased investor appetite across growth-oriented sectors with strong capabilities in both the public and private markets. With respect to capital structure advisory, we continue to see a long runway of liability management assignments driven by the significant leverage that exists across many companies compounded by the accelerating pace of technology disruption. And over time, we anticipate more traditional restructurings as prior out-of-court solutions run their course. Finally, following substantial investment in 2025, our private capital advisory business is gaining meaningful traction and is well positioned to serve our sponsor clients as the GP-led secondary market continues to hit record levels. Our thesis for this business is clearly being validated. Our PCA team is fully integrated with our industry and financial sponsor bankers, and our secondaries pipeline is developing rapidly. We continue to invest in this area with the addition of a managing director focused on private credit secondaries joining next week. And with another MD joining later this year, we will have a team of seven managing directors dedicated to GP-led secondaries. This growth enhances our ability to support sponsor clients and reinforces our conviction that PCA will be an increasingly important fourth pillar of our firm. Against this constructive backdrop, we see significant opportunity to continue growing our client capabilities and footprint. During 2025, we added 21 managing directors, including nine lateral hires. In the beginning of 2026, we promoted an additional 13 professionals to managing director, bringing our total MD count to 178 as of today's call. These promotions, together with our continued hiring, deepen our global centers of excellence and further align the firm with the largest market opportunities. Given our strong revenue performance and the maturation of our recent investments, we delivered meaningful operating leverage this year. highlighted by a 320 basis point improvement in our adjusted compensation ratio to 65.8%. Our capital position remains strong with no debt and substantial cash, and we materially increased our capital return through significant share buybacks in the fourth quarter. In summary, our coverage platform and our culture of collaboration have never been stronger, our business outlook is positive, and our pipeline is near record levels. We are confident in our ability to continue driving growth while generating operating leverage and delivering sustained value for our clients, our shareholders, and our team over the long term. With that, I'll pass the call to Chris to review our financial results in more detail.