London — Los Angeles-based investment bank Houlihan Lokey was made for times such as these.
“We are definitely in the early days of this crisis, and there is more pain to come,” Scott Adelson, Houlihan’s co-president, said. “The model has proved resilient for decades, and it’s even more valid during periods of crisis.” The firm moved up six spots on the US M&A league tables this year, to No 27 by market share. It’s tied with JPMorgan Chase & Co and Morgan Stanley for the position of second-busiest US M&A adviser by number of transactions — behind only Goldman Sachs.
“Houlihan Lokey has probably the largest restructuring segment of any of the advisory firms,” said Devin Ryan, a senior research analyst at JMP Securities. “Revenues for most advisers are likely to be down quite a bit this year — Houlihan will be an outlier and we expect their revenues will be much more resilient.”
Houlihan was founded in California in 1972 by Richard Houlihan and Kit Lokey. In the near-half century that has followed it has expanded globally and now has more than 20 offices across the US, Europe and Asia Pacific. Houlihan has been moving into new areas, including private equity fundraising advisory and technology banking, through a series of takeovers in the past few years. It also bulked up in Europe by purchasing Spain’s Fidentiis Capital, British boutiques McQueen and Quayle Munro and Gruppo Banca Leonardo’s investment banking operations in several countries.