You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: I am Patrick Suehnholz, Greenhill's Head of Investor Relations.
Joining me on the call today is Scott Bok, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.
These statements are based on our current expectations regarding future events that, by their nature, are outside of the firm's control and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions.
For a discussion of some of the risks and factors that could affect the firm's future results, please see our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K.
We reported fourth quarter revenue of $140.7 million, which was our best quarterly performance ever, an operating margin of 57% and net income of $2.71 per share.
For the year, we had revenue of $311.7 million, an operating margin of 18% and net income of $1.36 per share.
Our quarterly revenue was up 32% and earnings per share was up 158% from the same period last year.
For the full year, our revenue was up 4% and earnings per share was up 202% from the prior year.
In sum, we had a very strong finish to the year, resulting in very respectable pandemic year results on the top and bottom line, all consistent with our commentary on the past couple of quarterly investor calls.
Clearly, quarterly revenue, of the scale we achieved requires a lot of things to go right.
We generated multiple, very significant M&A completion fees, multiple very significant restructuring completion fees and a long list of smaller fees to go with them.
We also benefited more than usual from accounting rules in relation to revenue recognition that came into effect a few years ago and sometimes require revenue from completion fees to be booked before the transaction triggering that fee is fully completed.
But just to make clear that our very strong quarter was not simply a matter of transaction timing, our earnings per share for the quarter was greater than the analyst consensus forecast for the fourth quarter and the next four quarters ahead combined.
In other words, our profit in one quarter exceeded what was expected for five quarters.
Looking at our full year results.
We benefited from particularly strong results from our European M&A business and our U.S. restructuring business.
We also benefited from an expanding array of financing advisory roles that are neither traditional M&A nor traditional restructuring.
Our private capital advisory business made a meaningful contribution as well, albeit considerably less so than in the prior year.
Our revenue for the year was highly concentrated in a few busy areas, as many regions and sectors were heavily impacted by the pandemic and related constraints in economic activity and thus produced only modest revenue.
Importantly, we see nearly all of those areas has poised for significant improvement in 2021, given current market conditions and what we can see in our pipeline of assignments.
Turning to our costs.
Our compensation ratio for the year was 62%, moderately above our target level as we invested much of our non-compensation savings in rewarding our strong performers in what was the challenging year for all.
For the quarter, the compensation ratio was unusually low, as we work to achieve a reasonable full-year cost level.
We did similarly in last year's fourth quarter.
As noted in the past, we will have some quarterly volatility, but aim to manage annual compensation cost to a target level.
Our non-compensation costs were down 18% from the prior year, despite the fact that we incurred rent expense on two New York headquarters locations for much of the year as we built out new space.
Some of those cost savings flowed from reduced travel due to pandemic-related restrictions, and we believe those cost savings will continue for much of this year.
Even after that, we expect to have considerably lower travel expense than we had historically.
Separate from travel, our cost savings resulted from a wide variety of management initiatives, and we expect the benefits of those moves to be sustained for the long-term.
As a result, we expect our 2021 non-compensation cost to be materially lower than they were in 2020, when it-turn they were substantially below the level in 2019.
As one example, the rent expense for our headquarters in 2021 should be $7 million less than it was in 2020, given we have both more expensive space and some months of duplication in the year just ended.
Notwithstanding those savings, we will have a higher quality space and room for more bankers than we did in our prior headquarters location.
Given the significant opportunities we have found to reduce non-compensation costs, we see increased potential to attain our goal of a 25% operating margin like we achieved for many years of our history, and that is our goal.
Our interest expense for the year was $15.5 million, well below last year's level, as we benefited from a lower interest rate premium post our refinancing last year, lower market interest rate levels, reduced debt outstanding, and the absence of a refinancing charge.
For the quarter, interest expense was $3.5 million, as we continue to benefit from low market rates and debt reduction.
And our borrowing cost is currently around 3.4% and should remain low, based on market expectations of continued low interest rates and our interest expense should continue to decline in line with our pay down of debt.
Our income taxes were considerably lower than last year, as our income was skewed to lower rate jurisdictions.
The opposite of last year when it was skewed to higher rate jurisdictions.
We also benefited to some degree from various tax law changes that were put in place during 2020 as a result of the pandemic.
Going forward, we continued to expect an effective tax rate of around 25%, excluding any charge or benefit relating to the impact of share settlements on vesting restricted stock and assuming no major changes in tax laws in the primary places we operate.
The actual rate could end up somewhat higher or lower in any given year, depending on where we earn most of our income in such year.
We ended the year with $112.7 million of cash and debt of $326.9 million, meaning we had net debt of $214.2 million.
During 2020, we made principal payments of $38.8 million on our term loan, including a discretionary payment of $20 million at year-end.
There are no mandatory principal payments due until March of 2022, but we intend to continue paying down our debt on an accelerated basis as our cash flow allows.
Given the uncertainty created by the pandemic, we purchased only 489,704 shares in the open market in 2020, plus another 764,529 share equivalents in connection with tax withholding on vesting restricted stock units for a total cost of $23.3 million.
Our Board has authorized $50 million in repurchases of shares and share equivalents for the year ahead through January 2022.
While our principal focus will be on deleveraging, we intend to purchase shares on a prudent manner in an effort to further enhance the upside potential for continuing shareholders.
In that regard, note that, our employees own about half of the economics of the firm through stock and restricted stock.
So we are fully aligned with shareholders, as we seek to maximize value through the prudent use of the cash that we generate.
We also declared our usual quarterly dividend of $0.05 per share.
We entered 2021 in what feels like a favorable environment for our business.
With respect to M&A, a positive economic outlook, driven by unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, combined with high stock prices, low borrowing costs, very substantial dry powder of private equity funds, a plethora of special-purpose acquisition companies looking for deals, and a variety of other factors should drive increased deal activity.
In particular, we expect increased M&A revenue in most of our international offices as well as in the certain sectors like industrials, where activity was low in 2020.
At the same time, while restructuring activity has cooled considerably from 2020's frenetic pace, more debt restructuring should be needed for the many industries and companies adversely affected by the continuing pandemic.
In addition, we are seeing significant opportunity to advise on various kinds of debt and equity financings and expect those assignments to provide a meaningful part of our near-term revenue.
In sum, we would be very disappointed if we fail to generate meaningful revenue growth in 2021.
And given our expectations of lower cost, higher revenue should result in margin expansion and increased earnings.
I will now make a few comments on our strategy.
Our overarching objective is to increase the scale, diversity and consistency of our revenue sources, while maintaining appropriate discipline on expenses.
As always, we will look to recruit M&A bankers who bring us incremental industry sector expertise or regional capabilities.
We have an active pipeline of good prospects in that regard.
With respect to restructuring advice, we see our strategic initiative of the past few years to significantly expand our team as a major success but we believe, there remains the potential to expand even further.
In particular, we want to play more advisory roles on debt and equity financing transactions.
We've had increasing success in broadening the range of transactions on which we advice and we see this as an opportunity that will continue even in periods where there's much less bankruptcy-related activity than we have seen off-late.
In our private capital advisory business, we have strong teams in Europe and Asia, and are in the process of rebuilding in the U.S., with an increased focus on higher value-added transactions.
In terms of strategic initiatives, we are aiming to enhance our focus on advising financial sponsors on a wide variety of transactions.
Historically, we focused heavily on serving public companies and we've enjoyed great success with that constituency, However, over time, we came to realize though we've had increasing interaction with financial sponsors across our M&A, restructuring and private capital advisory businesses.
We are now aiming to organize those efforts in a more systematic way designed to generate more revenue and we have already put significant resources into this initiative.
We are hopeful that it will be at least as successful as the restructuring advisory team expansion, that was our primary strategic focus over the last couple of years.
In closing, I want to mention two landmark events in the life of our firm.
First, this week, we are opening our new headquarters in the newly renovated Rockefeller Center building on Sixth Avenue, that is known to many as the old Time Life Building.
We look forward to welcoming clients there once the pandemic is subsided.
Second, a couple of weeks ago, we passed the 25-year mark in the life of our firm.
It is obviously not the time for celebrations of any kind, but it is worth noting the fact that our firm has proven resilient through numerous challenges over that quarter of a century, the dot com bubble bursting, the September 11 terrorist attacks, the financial crisis of 2008 and now a major pandemic.
Our strong culture is the source of our resilience and both our global team and our brand will emerge from the pandemic stronger than ever.
With that, I'm happy to take any questions.

user
compname reports q4 earnings per share of $2.71.
compname reports fourth quarter earnings per share of $2.71 and full year 2020 earnings per share of $1.36.
q4 revenue rose 32 percent to $140.7 million.
q4 earnings per share $2.71.

assistant