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'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.
What a difference a year makes.
This time last year, we were in the early stages of the global pandemic.
There was uncertainty about the science and trajectory of the virus and there was no visibility on vaccines.
The economic environment was weak, and the pace and shape of an economic recovery was unclear.
With so much uncertainty and the weak economic environment and outlook, most of our clients turned inward to focus on operations, liquidity and in many cases, restructuring, while restructuring activity was -- and strategic activity was paused.
From an operational perspective, I don't think any of us expected to spend the remainder of 2020 and a good portion of '21 working predominantly remotely.
Fast forward one year and we've made tremendous progress.
Monetary and fiscal stimulus helped stabilize the economy, and financial markets and the recovery is well under way.
Vaccine distribution is gaining momentum and as a firm, we are actively planning for a gradual return to our offices over the next several months.
And our business is robust, as we continue to act as an advisor to clients on strategic financial investment and capital initiatives.
The momentum we experienced through the first half of last year has continued into the first quarter.
Our results, which represent our best first quarter ever, reflect our team's client focus, the breadth of capabilities that we can offer and the continued favorable environment for M&A and capital raising activity.
Transactions announced in the second half of 2020 and some even earlier moved toward completion during the quarter and translated to revenues.
We've also realized revenues from transactions announced and closed within the first quarter and it benefited from increased demand for activist defense advice over the past several months.
Capital advisory, both public and private, has continued its strong contribution.
The breadth of our equity capital markets capabilities, including IPOs and follow-ons, convertibles and SPACs has enabled us to participate in a meaningful way in the sustained strong levels of market issuance.
In the first quarter, we participated in nearly 40 public market transactions that raised more than $22 billion in total proceeds.
In Private Capital Advisory, GP-led transactions remained strong during the quarter and we have seen a strong recovery of volumes in new capital needs.
In the face of economic recovery and strength in M&A and capital raising, classic restructuring activity has slowed and is concentrated among key sectors and issuers that have not rebounded as quickly as some others have.
Our Equities business, Evercore ISI, has continued to stay connected and engaged with our clients and has provided valuable research insight and sales and trading execution.
And solid performance drove AUM growth in our Wealth Management business.
We continue to focus on expanding coverage of key industries and building out our capabilities.
And we are benefiting from Kristy Grippi joining us earlier this year as our new Head of ECM, as well as other strategic adds we've made on our ECM team.
With the key ingredients for M&A activity in place, a positive economic outlook, strong equity markets and available credit, high CEO confidence and continued private equity activity, the momentum for strategic activity continues and the desire for capital raising persists.
Several of our key markets continue to be busy and our backlogs are strong.
The strategic merger market accelerated in the first quarter.
Global and US announced M&A dollar volume increased 95% and 164% respectively compared to the first quarter of 2020 and increased 3% and 13% respectively from a strong fourth quarter.
In ECM, the desire for capital raising remained strong, though we have seen a cooling off in the SPAC underwriting market over the past several weeks.
Our investments in SPAC capabilities have positioned us well to serve many new clients, though we remain selective in our participation in underwriting opportunities.
We continue to see activity and shareholder advisory and activist defense.
The number of new activist positions in the US reached its highest level in more than two years at the end of 2020 and activists are focusing on larger targets.
On the private capital advisory side of things, we are seeing accelerating activity in both capital raising for new funds as well as secondary and GP level activity.
In short, we feel continuing momentum in our business and we are excited by the prospects we see in front of us.
Our broad capabilities have positioned us well to offer more services to clients as they execute on their priorities.
Let me now turn to our financial results.
We achieved record first quarter adjusted operating income, adjusted operating margin, adjusted net income and adjusted earnings per share driven by solid revenue growth and good operating leverage.
First quarter adjusted net revenues of $669.9 million grew 54% year-over-year.
First quarter advisory fees of $512.1 million was 43% year-over-year.
Based on current consensus, estimates and actual results, we expect to maintain our number-four ranking on advisory fees among all publicly traded investment banking firms for the last 12 months and to grow our market share relative to these same firms.
We also continued to narrow the gap between us and the number-three ranked firm on a latest 12-month advisory revenue and market share basis.
Our first quarter underwriting fees of $79.3 million more than tripled year-over-year.
As we said last quarter, this business experienced a step-up in 2020 as the demand for capital raising increased substantially and the expansion of our capabilities and enhanced sector coverage enabled us to work on diverse assignments for clients.
We've continued to broaden our participation across sectors, which we believe is helping us grow our business.
While healthcare still represents the largest portion of revenues, TMT and Industrials more than tripled their combined portion of revenues in the first quarter compared to full year 2020.
First quarter commissions and related revenue of $53.5 million decreased 4% year-over-year as volumes declined relative to the elevated levels in the first quarter of 2020.
First quarter asset management and administration fees of $17.8 million increased 16% year-over-year on higher AUM, which was $10.6 billion at quarter end, an increase of 11% year-over-year.
Turning to expenses, our adjusted compensation revenue for the first quarter is 59%.
First quarter non-comp costs of $72.7 million declined 12% year-over-year.
Our non-compensation ratio for the first quarter is 10.9%.
Bob will comment more on our non-comp expenses in his comments.
First quarter adjusted operating income and adjusted net income of $201.8 million and $162.5 million increased 145% and 181% respectively.
We delivered a first quarter adjusted operating margin of 30.1% and a first quarter adjusted earnings per share of $3.29 increased 172% year-over-year.
Finally, we continued to execute on our capital return strategy.
We returned $275.3 million to shareholders during the quarter through dividends and the repurchase of 1.9 million shares.
And we achieved our commitment to offset the delusion associated with our annual bonus RSU grants through share repurchase in the first quarter.
Our Board declared a dividend of $0.68, an increase of 11.5%.
We expect to continue our annual reassessment of the dividend each April.
Our Board also approved a refresh of our share repurchase authority to $750 million.
We will resume our historical policy of returning cash not needed for investment in our business to our shareholders through additional share repurchases.
Our first quarter results clearly demonstrate that we are operating at a higher level than the level at which we have operated historically as measured by any financial metric; revenues, operating income, net income, earnings per share, operating margins and Senior Managing Director productivity and Advisory.
While our operating margins clearly are benefiting modestly from the decline in travel and entertainment due to the pandemic, the strength in the other financial metrics is indicative of a real uptick in our business.
Our diverse capabilities and the more balanced mix of our business contributed to our record first quarter results, the third best quarter in our firm's history as well as to the record fourth quarter and full year results last year.
On top of our strong financial performance, we sustained our number-one league table ranking in the dollar volume of announced M&A transactions both globally and in the US among independent firms for the last 12 months ending March 31 and in the first quarter of 2021.
And we advised on the two largest M&A transactions announced in the first quarter.
Additionally, while not first quarter events, we have prominent roles on the two biggest tech announcements this year, both of which were announced in April.
We served as the lead advisor on Grab's $40 billion IPO buyer, a SPAC merger, the largest tech merger this year, the largest SPAC merger in history and the largest pipe issued in conjunction with a SPAC merger at a little over $4 billion.
And we also served as the sole advisor to Nuance on its pending $19.7 billion sale to Microsoft, the second largest tech merger this year.
These are franchise-defining transactions for our clients and for Evercore and are reflective of the breadth of our capabilities and the strength of collaboration and teamwork across the firm.
Our underwriting business continues to perform well and produced its third best quarter ever.
When we first acquired ISI almost seven years ago, we identified one of the most important opportunities created by that transaction to be our ability to increase our underwriting revenues to perhaps $75 million to a $100 million of revenue per year over the ensuing few years.
It unquestionably took a little bit longer than we initially expected to get to that level of revenue annually, but we have definitely seen a real step function increase in this business.
In fact, three of the past four quarters, including the first quarter of 2021, where in just one quarter, within that $75 million to a $100 million target that we had set for the full year.
Activity in backlogs and underwriting continued to be strong, and we remain focused on building out this business strategically so that we can continue to serve the needs of our clients without any use of our balance sheet.
Needless to say, our revenue aspirations for this business have grown materially.
The first quarter also saw a number of significant transactions in the convertible debt space, which we launched in the third quarter of 2020, including our first sole book-run convertible offering and an active book-runner position on a biotech convert.
These transactions are indicative of the breadth and diversity of our platform and our capacity to meet increasingly diverse client needs.
Our investments in ECM have earned us a place in the top 20 for underwriting revenue as estimated by Dealogic when bot deals are excluded.
We continue to believe that we have runway here and we are focused on systematically gaining share as we have done in Advisory historically.
The breaking into the Top 10 currently seems challenging given our aversion to block trades and our independent balance sheet light approach.
Activity in our Private Capital Advisory businesses.
Our secondaries advisory business, which we call PCA; our primary fundraising business, which we call PFG; and our real estate fund-raising in secondaries business, which we call RECA continues to be strong as volumes increased meaningfully during the quarter.
Our success in this area is driven by the strength of our client relationships and our superb execution track record, including our unique success executing transactions done solely through remote communication.
In restructuring, the team's activity level and footprint are resetting back toward historical levels as the economy and debt market liquidity have meaningfully improved.
The team continues to work through assignments started in 2020 and is also focused on new liability management, private financing and conventional restructuring assignments in sectors that are still stressed by the pandemic.
In equities, client connectivity and engagement continue to be strong as our macroeconomic and fundamental analysts continue to provide valuable insights to institutional clients.
Our team also has continued to meet high client demand for our robust virtual conferences, webinars and corporate access events.
The investments that we have made in our platform to support our ECM franchise including convertibles performed well during the quarter and are natural capability extension for us.
And we continue to expand our sector coverage with Mark Mahaney's launch on Internet stocks earlier this month.
And as we've always said, we will continue to look for senior impactful analysts who will serve our clients and contribute to the growth of this business.
Finally, our Wealth Management business continue to grow AUM as long-term performance has remained very solid and as we have continued to provide important advice to our client.
Let me now turn to discuss some of our priorities for the remainder of the year.
As we think about the rest of the year, we are focused on several important items.
First, we are intensely focused on continuing to position our business for sustaining long-term growth by number one, providing outstanding advice and execution of our clients as we continue to advise them on their most important strategic financial and capital decisions; number two, by continuing to enhance our coverage of the most significant client groups, including our initiatives around the Evercore 100 and financial sponsors; number three, investing to further deepen and broaden our capabilities by continuing to build out certain industry groups, geographies and product capabilities.
Second, we are focused on planning for our return to our offices globally with the health and safety of our employees and their families paramount as we develop and execute our plans.
Third, we are highly focused on integrating diversity, equity and inclusion and sustainability more completely into how we conduct our business and how we hire, train and mentor our talent.
And finally, we are focused on operating with financial discipline and delivering strong returns to our shareholders, returning excess cash not needed for growth investments to our shareholders through dividends and share repurchases while maintaining a strong and liquid balance sheet.
We are actively recruiting A-plus and A talent in advisory to our team, and we continue to have many conversations with talented individuals in key sectors and geographies, including TMT, fintech, biopharma, healthcare, consumer, financial sponsors, and Europe.
Equally important is our long-term commitment to attracting, recruiting, mentoring and promoting talented professionals and promoting them to Senior Managing Director from within.
We strongly believe that in-person collaboration, training and mentorship are crucial to our culture and our apprenticeship model.
These experiences are most effective when we are together and contribute to the development of our future leaders, which is why we are so focused on our return to office over the next several months.
We are pleased to be sustaining advisory Senior Managing Director productivity that is at a materially higher level than our long-term average.
However, we are finding, probably due to the pandemic, that it is taking new hires and new internally promoted Senior Managing Directors a little longer, perhaps a year or so longer, to reach full productivity.
Fortunately, this longer ramp time means that we have more partners who will contribute to our future growth.
The first quarter results and achievements that John and I have summarized and really are results over the past year could not have happened without the dedication, teamwork, collaboration and commitment of our entire team.
Every single one of our employees has stepped up to the challenges of the past year plus and there have been many such challenges.
We very much look forward to bring our teams back together in person soon, so that we can continue to build and strengthen the culture that has been the foundation of our success.
Beginning with GAAP and some related metrics.
For the first quarter of 2021, net revenues, net income and earnings per share on a GAAP basis were $662 million, $144 million and $3.25 respectively.
Our GAAP tax rate for the first quarter was 16.1% compared to 25.8% for the prior year period.
The appreciation in the firm's share price upon vesting of employee share-based awards above the original grant price positively affected our effective tax rate on both the GAAP and adjusted basis.
On a GAAP basis, our share count was 44.5 million shares for the first quarter.
The share count for adjusted earnings per share was $49.4 million for the quarter.
Focusing for a moment on non-compensation costs, as John noted, we continued to generate significant operating leverage, in part due to lower non-compensation costs.
Firmwide non-compensation costs per employee were approximately $40,000 for the first quarter, down 9% on a year-over-year basis.
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, including returning to our offices and engaging in person with our clients, costs associated with recruiting, travel, entertainment and other expenses are expected to increase.
Commissions and Related Fees has been renamed to Commissions and Related Revenues and now includes riskless principal profits, which were previously in Other Revenue including interest and investments.
The reclassified revenue principally represents the spread income earned from riskless principal transactions in convertibles and other fixed income securities.
Finally, focusing on the balance sheet, two points.
On March 29th, we issued $38 million of aggregate principal amount of unsecured senior notes with a 1.97% coupon through a private placement.
We used the proceeds from the notes to refinance senior notes that matured on March 30th.
And finally, at the end of the quarter, we held $411 million in cash and cash equivalents and $873 million in investment securities down from year-end due to compensation-related payments and strong return of capital.
Operator, if you could open the line?

user
compname reports record first quarter 2021 results increases quarterly dividend to $0.68 per share.
compname reports record first quarter 2021 results; increases quarterly dividend to $0.68 per share.
qtrly earnings per share $3.25.
qtrly adjusted earnings per share $3.29.
qtrly adjusted net revenues of $669.9 million increased 54%.

assistant