Houlihan Lokey, Inc. (NYSE:HLI) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Scott Beiser: Yeah. I think we still believe that, that’s the nature of the mid-market business. It is going to draw down a bit and speed up quicker than others. I think what we would all like to see is a consistent trend instead of things like almost every two months, the market tone goes from, oh, yeah, we are definitely going to have a soft landing to, oh, yeah, a definite recession is occurring, oh, yeah, interest rates are going to stay up higher and longer than we thought to maybe now they are not, all of that. Look, we have had a better month in the stock market and bond market during January, but February could be a reversal of that or it could be a continuation trend. I think we have commented in the past that as time goes on and we are not in either a decreasing stock market or at least not a significant decreasing, buyers and sellers are getting closer and closer to hitting that point of equilibrium, so I think that is improving with time.

There’s probably some impatience level by the private equity firms to eventually start deploying capital. And then the question we answered earlier, I’d say, the financing marketplace at least in the mid-cap space, slightly better in January, but not enough to say, yeah, we are back into an environment where we can finance meaningfully more deals than has been occurring in the last couple of quarters. That just hasn’t happened yet.

Steven Chubak: That’s great color, Scott. Thank you. And if I could squeeze in one more quickly, just given you have had 12 months of GCA results under your belt, I was hoping you could speak to how the business performed this year and whether you are seeing any evidence of those revenue synergies coming through, whether there’s any tangible examples that you can cite in that regard?

Lindsey Alley: So, as you said, we have been with GCA for a year. We don’t break out the GCA business, and as you know, a good chunk of GCA was nontechnology. So we have merged essentially all of the GCA operations into the individual industry group. So hard to tell from our publicly disclosed numbers how GCA is doing. We are thrilled with the acquisition and how it’s come together. I would say, especially in Europe, we have seen the revenue synergies that we see on every transaction, where we see a meaningful increase in average transaction size and average fee, and as you know, Europe was more than 50% of their business. So we have lost very few individuals since we did the transaction, so the workforce is still in place. So I mean we are excited about the acquisition a year out, and as you know, technology has been one of the more affected industry groups.

GCA has seen that in their results. But again, the important thing to us is that we have the workforce in place that we acquired a year ago. We are seeing those revenue synergies that you alluded to, especially in Europe and the collaboration among the deal teams across really all three product lines has been as good as we have seen on any acquisition.

Scott Beiser: Yeah. I would just further say that the interaction between the bankers, the interface with the clients has been probably better than we would have ever mapped or thought out the negative is taking a little longer and a little bit more money to do some of the back-office consolidations and synergies, just different IT type of systems, different payroll systems, different geographies, all of those things just certainly take a little bit longer. We will get to it and we feel we have made a lot of headway. It’s taken us a little longer on the back office stuff and on the front interrelationship on the client-facing side, we think it’s been actually very excellent.

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