Greenhill's CEO Discusses Q4 2011 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

I would now like to turn the call over to Scott Bok.

Scott Bok

Thank you, Richard. As we did in our press release I want to start today’s call by thanking everyone who expressed their condolences and heartfelt support following the recent loss of two of our managing directors. Jeff Buckalew and Rakesh Chawla as well as Jeff’s wife and two children in a tragic airplane accident last month. This is a painful loss for their families and all who knew them, not least their fellow Greenhill colleagues who had worked closely with Jeff for 15 years and Rakesh for eight years.

While we continue to miss them both very deeply on a personal as well as professional level, I can assure you that everyone at Greenhill is determined to press ahead. The strong culture that they helped to build the Greenhill is strengthened furthered by our shared greed of their loss will see us through this difficult time.

And with that I would like to turn to discussing our latest results. We are very pleased with all aspects of our results for both the quarter and the full year. Our advisory revenue was up 51% for the quarter and 21% for the full year despite what I am sure everyone would agree was a very challenging deal environment. Our total revenue which reflects the value movements in our remaining principle investments in addition to our advisory revenue was up meaningfully for the quarter and modestly for the full year.

Our pre-tax profit margin was 34% for the quarter and 26% for the year and our earnings per share of $0.67 in Q4 mean that in EPS terms we were up about 11 times versus the prior year’s quarter and 41% for the full year. Note that all the cost and profitability figures we cite exclude $7 million of expense that is the acceleration of past year’s restricted stock grants that were made to our two partners who passed away.

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