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Text: I'm Hallie Miller, Evercore's Head of Investor Relations.
These factors include, but are not limited to, those discussed in Evercore's filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K.
We continue to believe that it is important to evaluate Evercore's performance on an annual basis.
As we have noted previously, our results for any particular quarter are influenced by the timing of transaction closings.
It's hard to believe that when we reported our 2019 earnings at this time last year, everything was "normal".
The past 12 months, however, have been anything but normal.
So, please indulge me a brief review of the year.
When faced in mid-March with two simultaneous crises, a global pandemic and the sharpest economic downturn in decades, our entire business and way of life was disrupted.
Our clients' needs changed rapidly and many of their strategic initiatives, particularly their M&A plans, were placed on hold.
Corporate leaders and financial sponsors became focused almost exclusively on cost control, reducing capital spending, increasing liquidity, amending debt covenants and strengthening their balance sheets.
And while most previously committed M&A transactions were complete, this strategic M&A activity essentially stopped.
Later in the second quarter, as fiscal and monetary stimulus stabilized the debt and equity markets, we helped client capitalize on the opportunity to build liquidity and in certain cases to initiate large restructuring and recapitalization transactions.
These balance sheet and liquidity focused assignments, which drove demand for capital raising advice and execution in both the equity and debt markets, dominated our advisory services in the second quarter and into the beginning of the third quarter.
As the third quarter evolved, strategic and M&A discussions began to resume.
Despite the sharp decline in M&A activity, which lasted several months starting the beginning of March, our revenues were essentially flat year-over-year through the first nine months.
So, how did this happen?
First, over the last few years, we have made significant investments that have materially broadened the services that we can provide to our clients.
We acquired ISI, which materially enhanced our research, underwriting and distribution capabilities.
We greatly strengthened our restructuring team by adding five new SMDs globally, dramatically enhanced our equity underwriting team, we enhanced our private capital raising capabilities for both sponsors and public and private companies, we strengthened our debt advisory capabilities, we added the best activist defense and shareholder engagement team in our entire industry and we added best-in-class capabilities in corporate restructuring, split offs, spins, Morris Trust, reverse Morris Trust, etc.
, and best-in-class capabilities in SPAC capital raising and SPAC merger advice.
So, first, first nine months of 2020, we demonstrated that we have in place best-in-class capabilities to advise our clients in widely varied environments.
And second, we demonstrated that our team has the talent and the entrepreneurial spirit to deploy these capabilities rapidly in support of our clients.
In the latter half of 2020, the M&A market began to recover meaningfully.
Local and US M&A volume increased 92% and 163% respectively compared to the first half and the number of global and US deals increased 18% and 16% respectively.
Still, for the year, M&A volume was down [Technical Issues].
And in the US, the largest M&A market for all firms, and for Evercore particularly, M&A volume was down 21%.
The recovery in M&A, coupled with continued momentum in the broader advisory capabilities that I just described, led to a spectacular fourth quarter by any measure and fueled the many records that we achieved as a firm in 2020.
The point of this review is simple.
In 2020, we proved that while M&A is still our largest source of revenue, our capabilities to advise our clients and to be paid for that advice is much broader than many of our shareholders and many of our analysts -- and perhaps even we -- would have anticipated.
So, while there clearly is some cyclicality in various parts of our business, we truly are very much an all-weather firm that can advise clients on their most important strategic, financial and capital needs in widely varied environments and a firm that can generate significant revenues by providing that advice to our clients in widely varied environments, all the while sticking religiously to our fee-only, no capital risk business model.
As we begin 2021, M&A dialogs and strategic activity discussions are strong.
Growth companies continued to access the public markets for capital.
Financial sponsors and other private businesses are seeking capital and acquisitions in the private and public markets and institutional investors continue to value high quality research, investment analysis and advice.
So, as we enter 2021, our momentum continues to be significant in all of our businesses.
The level of activity of our teams is high and our backlogs remains very strong.
While there certainly still are challenges related to the pandemic and the economy and all of us at Evercore most certainly have enormous empathy for those in our society who have not been as fortunate as we have been, we begin 2021 in a very strong position.
As we look forward, we continue to focus on long-term and trusted relationships with both current and prospective clients determined to advise them on their most important strategic, financial and capital decisions.
We are planning for our eventual return to our offices globally, with the health and safety of our team paramount as we develop these plans.
We are focused on maintaining our strong culture that is grounded in our core values and in collaboration, both of which are hugely important contributors to our many accomplishments in 2020.
We, of course, are actively pursuing opportunities to add talent strategically throughout the firm and we are optimistic about our ability to recruit this talent.
We see significant opportunities to continue to grow our business, both by expanding our coverage of key sectors and geographies and by deepening our product capabilities.
And we are committed to continuing to operate with financial discipline, delivering strong returns to our shareholders, while maintaining a strong and liquid balance sheet and resuming our historical approach of returning any excess capital to our shareholders through dividends and share repurchases.
Let me now turn to our financial results.
We achieved record fourth quarter and full-year adjusted revenues, adjusted operating income, adjusted net income and adjusted EPS, driven by extremely strong revenue growth and good operating leverage.
Fourth quarter adjusted net revenues of $969.9 million grew 45% year-over-year and full-year adjusted net revenues of $2.33 billion grew 14% compared to 2019, the highest annual revenues in our history.
Fourth quarter advisory fees of $790 million grew 40% year-over-year and full year advisory fees of $1.76 billion grew 6% compared to 2019 and also were the highest in our history.
Based on current consensus estimates and actual results, we expect to maintain our number 4 ranking on advisory fees among all publicly traded investment banking firms and we also expect to grow our market share among these firms.
Importantly, our growth in 2020, combined with declining advisory revenues at the three top bulge bracket firms, resulted in a nearly 50% reduction in the gap between us and the number 3 ranked firm and we narrowed the gap between Evercore and the number 1 and number 2 firms as well.
Fourth quarter underwriting fees of $95 million and full-year underwriting fees of $276.2 million each more than tripled year-over-year.
This business experienced the true step up in 2020, in large part due to the expansion of our capabilities that allowed us to work on a variety of assignments for our clients, including IPOs, follow-ons, convertibles, SPACs and caps, as well as the more prominent role we play in virtually all transactions with which we were involved.
Fourth quarter commissions and related fees of $52.4 million increased 1% year-over-year and full year commissions and related fees of $205.8 million increased 9% compared to 2019.
Fourth quarter asset administration fees of $20.1 million increased 20% year-over-year and full-year asset management and administration fees of $67.2 million increased 11% compared to 2019.
Turning to expenses, our adjusted compensation rate for the fourth quarter is 52.3% and for the full year is 58.9%.
Fourth quarter non-compensation costs of $85.8 million declined 12% year-over-year.
And full-year non-compensation costs of $316.7 million declined 10% versus [Technical Issues].
Fourth quarter adjusted operating income and adjusted net income of $376.4 million and $277.4 million increased 110% and 113% respectively and adjusted earnings per share of $5.67 increased 108% versus the fourth quarter of 2019.
Full-year operating income and adjusted net income of $639.3 million and $459.6 million increased 28% and 23% respectively and adjusted earnings per share of $9.62 increased 25% versus 2019.
We produced a full-year adjusted operating margin of 27.5%, roughly 300 basis points of margin expansion compared to 2019.
Finally, we remain committed to returning excess capital to our shareholders.
Our Board declared a dividend of $0.61 and we will resume our normal annual reassessment of that dividend in April.
We remain committed to offsetting the dilution of our upcoming bonus RSU grants and RSU grants to new hires through share buybacks.
And we will resume our historical policy of returning excess earnings not reinvested in the business to our shareholders through dividends and share repurchases.
Bob will comment later on our GAAP results and provide additional detail on our balance sheet.
Our results demonstrate clearly that we are a leader in virtually every business in which we participate and our strength in the fourth quarter in particular contributed significantly to the many records we set for the full year as a firm.
We sustained our number one League Table ranking for volume of announced M&A transactions both globally and in the US among independent firms in 2020 and are advising on 4 of the 10 largest US M&A transactions in 2020.
In the fourth quarter, we realized revenues from many assignments that we started earlier in the year.
And we participated in a number of announced transactions that will close in the future.
This includes advising AstraZeneca on its acquisition of Alexion which was announced in the fourth quarter and is the largest healthcare deal and the largest cross-border deal since the onset of the pandemic.
Our restructuring team ranked number 2 in the League Tables for number of announced US transactions in 2020.
We believe that our restructuring franchise is even stronger than the League Table indicates due to our diversified business base of working with both debtor and creditor clients, as well as working on both in-court and out-of-court restructurings.
Our restructuring business can deliver service and advice far beyond the traditional Chapter 11 bankruptcy advice and many companies called on us in 2020 for our liability management and financing capabilities.
We believe activity levels will remain elevated as certain sectors and companies continue the slow and taxing recovery from the pandemic induced downturn.
Our equity capital markets business performed exceptionally well in 2020 and we expect to continue to benefit from the sustained strong market for equity issuance.
We continue to see strong results from our ongoing investment in this business, which has diversified our capabilities and has led to both fee-paying events and larger transactions.
In 2020, we participated in more than 100 equity and equity-linked transactions that raised nearly $70 billion in total proceeds.
Additionally, both sponsor and corporate clients increasingly have looked at Evercore to play a significant role in their capital raising.
We increased both the number of active book run and book run assignments in 2020 with our growth in active book run assignments outpacing our growth in book run assignments.
Our investments in SPAC capabilities have positioned us well to serve many new clients as they navigate this active market.
We are also encouraged by early results from our investment in convertible debt underwriting and sales and trading, including our first ever sole book run convertible transaction that took place just last week.
Our capital advisory group had a phenomenal year.
Our team advised on more than $30 billion of deals in GP and LP-led transactions, increased significantly in the second half of the year, and we continue to raise primary capital successfully for these clients.
In fact, the team has an impressive virtual fundraising track record, closing more funds virtually than anyone else in the industry.
We continue to see broad growth opportunities in these areas.
In defense and shareholder advisory where campaigns were down in 2020, we continued to experience very strong demand for our market-leading activism advisory practice.
We advised on the defense of the largest US hostile takeover attempt and successfully advised on the defense of two of the largest proxy fights.
Activist activity continues to build as activists increase their positions in companies.
In equities, our team of top institutional investor ranked macroeconomic and fundamental analysts provided valuable insights to our clients throughout this volatile year.
We also continue to make investments in our platform to support our ECM franchise, which enables us to execute at a very high level on a significant number of transactions, with increasingly important roles.
Finally, our wealth management business grew AUM past the $10 billion mark for the first time in 2020 and provided important investment advice to clients in a challenging environment.
We are pleased with these many accomplishments.
Yet, we remain focused on continuing this momentum in 2021 and beyond.
Let me now turn to discuss our opportunities for future growth.
Our expanded advisory and underwriting capabilities provide the foundation for our growth in the future and plenty of opportunity to grow remains.
We believe that there are two main elements to our future growth.
First, further expanding our coverage model, and second, deepening and broadening our capabilities.
Our continued efforts with the Evercore 100, our program to expand service to targeted large cap nationals and multinationals, our dedicated coverage of financial sponsors and investing in talent to grow in areas of whitespace with the addition of A plus talent will all facilitate our expanded coverage model.
There are many areas of untapped geographic and sector potential and we are actively seeking to add talent in those areas where we believe we can deepen our coverage, including TMT, FinTech, pharma, consumer, financial sponsors, large cap multinationals and Europe.
We continue to have many conversations with talented professionals to strengthen these important areas of coverage.
These additions enhance our advisory capabilities on complex, large cap corporate realignments and our capital markets [Indecipherable] business.
We look forward to additional talent announcements in 2021 as we resume a more normalized recruiting process.
Equally important to recruiting externally is our focus on long-term commitment to attracting recruiting and mentoring talented junior individuals and promoting from within.
These individuals contribute to our ability to be a self-sustaining from.
We are pleased to announce that we promoted three managing directors to senior managing director in January, strengthening our advisory coverage of healthcare and restructuring and our equities coverage of healthcare services and technology.
Deepening and broadening our capabilities, the second element of our growth plan further enables our bankers to collaborate with others across the firm to meet the strategic, financial and capital needs of our clients.
Evercore acted as a lead financial advisor and the sole debt advisor to this transaction.
In addition, people from M&A and advisory as well as equity capital markets and hedging all contributed to the advice.
We continue to focus on broadening and diversifying our capabilities, so that we can deepen client relationships, participate in a broader range of activities and earn a greater share of fees that clients pay to their advisor on any given transaction.
We've built a truly world-class ECM, underwriting and advisory business and we are excited to have Kristie join us to lead this business through its next stage of growth.
Our 2020 results demonstrate that the breadth and diversity of our capabilities drives deeper relationships with clients and helps with building new client relationships.
Our investments in both the SPAC and convertible markets are just two recent examples of investments that have enabled new opportunities to advise clients.
We believe that the significant opportunities remain to provide additional services to our current client base and to attract new clients.
Our broader capabilities have supported our industry-leading advisory SMD productivity.
We anticipate that, as these capabilities become more broadly utilized by our clients and our fee share increases, our market-leading productivity will be sustained or even enhanced.
The results and achievements that Ralph and I have summarized could not have happened without the dedication, teamwork, collaboration and commitment that our people demonstrated throughout one of the most uniquely challenging years many of us have ever experienced.
We are deeply grateful for their extraordinary effort.
Now, let me pass the call over to Bob.
Let's kick off with our GAAP results.
For the fourth quarter of 2020, net revenues, net income and earnings per share on a GAAP basis were $927 million, $220 million and $5.02 respectively.
For the full year, net revenues, net income and earnings per share on a GAAP basis were $2.3 billion, $351 million and $8.22 respectively.
As has been the case historically, our adjusted results exclude certain items related to the realignment strategy that began in the fourth quarter of 2019 and which was completed in the fourth quarter of 2020.
In total, we incurred separation and transition benefits and related costs of approximately $45 million, which reflect a modest increase in the costs from our prior estimate of $43 million.
During the fourth quarter of 2020, we recorded approximately $4 million of special charges, which are excluded from our adjusted results.
In the fourth quarter, we completed the sale of our broker-dealer business in Mexico to its management team and we completed the transition of our advisory business in Mexico to a strategic alliance with TACTIV, a newly performed strategic advisory firm founded by the former leaders of our advisory business.
There, there is a loss of approximately $31 million for the year included in other revenue that is related to our transition in Mexico.
Our adjusted results for the fourth quarter and full-year 2020 also exclude special charges of $1.3 million and $3.3 million respectively related to accelerated depreciation expense and $1.7 million related to the impairment of assets resulting from the wind down of our Mexico business.
Turning to taxes, our GAAP tax rate for the fourth quarter was 23.2% compared to 21.7% in the prior-year period.
Our GAAP tax rate for the full year was 23.7% compared to 21.2% in the prior period.
And on a GAAP basis, the share count was 43.9 million for the fourth quarter and 42.6 million for the full year.
Our share count for adjusted earnings per share was 48.9 million for the fourth quarter and 47.8 million for the full year.
Firmwide non-compensation costs per employee were approximately $47,000 for the fourth quarter and $172,000 for the full year, each down 9% and 11% on a year-over-year basis respectively.
The decrease in non-compensation costs per employee versus last year primarily reflects lower travel and related expenses.
As we continue to evolve toward more normal operations, costs associated with travel, recruiting and other expenses will begin to increase.
Finally, focusing on our balance sheet.
Our strong year-end balance sheet reflects the strength and momentum of the recovery in the latter part of the year.
As of December 31, we held approximately $830 million in cash and cash equivalents and $1.1 billion in investment in securities.
As is always the case at this time of year, a meaningful portion of our liquidity will be used to fund upcoming cash bonus payments, payments related to prior-year deferred compensation awards that are vesting currently, tax obligations related to compensation awards including relating to the net settlement of restricted stock units that vest in the first quarter.
Longer term, we are holding investment securities to fund payment obligations relating to deferred compensation awards that will vest in the future and to meet liquidity and regulatory capital requirements.
As of December 31, we have made commitments to pay more than $450 million related to future cash payment obligations under our long-term deferred compensation programs and these payment obligations exist at various dates through 2024.
These payments are, of course, subject to satisfaction of established investing requirements.
This number will change in the first quarter as prior awards will vest and be paid out and new awards relating to 2020 compensation will be granted.
The actions taken in 2020 strengthen our balance sheet significantly.
And as Ralph and John have noted, put us in a position to return free cash earnings generated from operations to investors, consistent with past practice.

user
compname reports quarterly adj earnings per share of $5.67.
compname reports full year 2020 results; record fourth quarter and full year revenues; quarterly dividend of $0.61 per share.
evercore inc - q4 u.s. gaap and adjusted net revenues of $927.3 million and $969.9 million, respectively.
evercore inc - qtrly earnings per share $5.02.
evercore inc - qtrly adjusted earnings per share $5.67.

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