Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Korn/Ferry International Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. Before I turn the call over to your host, Mr. Gary Burnison, let me first read a cautionary statement to investors. Certain statements made in the presentation today, such as those relating to future performance, plans and goals, will constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Although the company believes the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such statements. Actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected or desired because of a number of risks and uncertainties, which are beyond the company's control. Additional information concerning such risks and uncertainties can be found in the release relating to this presentation and the company's annual report for fiscal 2011, and in the other periodic reports filed by the company with the SEC. Also, some of the comments today will reference non-GAAP financial measures, such as adjusted operating earnings. Investors should review our reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures contained in the release relating to this presentation, which is posted on the company's website at www.kornferry.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mr. Burnison. Please go ahead, Mr. Burnison.

Well, thank you, and good afternoon, everybody. I'm going to -- I've got some prepared remarks here and then we'll turn it over to Bob Rozek, our CFO, then Gregg Kvochak, who you know. I guess I would parse my comments into a couple, one is looking in the rearview mirror, and the other is looking out the windshield. We performed again at a very high level for the year and the quarter. Our revenue of $790 million for our fiscal year essentially tied the highest in our history, with an operating margin of almost 11%. The top line was slightly up year-over-year at 6%, and that's with our leadership solution offering up 16%. And Futurestep was up 26%, which I think is a good validation of our strategy. Our search segment without the leadership offering was down 1%, and that was primarily due to softness in financial services and technology, and that was offset by strength in the industrial market and life sciences. We ended the year with $418 million of cash and marketable securities. For the quarter, our results were slightly better than our expectations. Quarterly revenue was $198 million, and that was up nearly 7% sequentially and slightly up year-over-year. For the quarter, we achieved adjusted EPS of $0.28. As I sit here today and I think back about 3 years ago, exactly 3 years ago when we were at the trough of the great recession, I look back over these 3 years, and I'm immediately proud. I mean, our business overall is up about 85%. Back then, 3 years ago, I think in our final quarter of fiscal '09, we were doing about $107 million. Here this quarter, we ended the quarter with $198 million. And when I think about that performance, it's not just absolute,…

Thanks, Gary. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm going to provide a little bit more -- probably granular color on the results for the quarter and for the full year. Despite the choppy and uncertain economic environment, our top line was very resilient as Gary indicated, in both the fourth quarter and for the full year fiscal of 2012. And as Gary said, these results really validate our strategic direction of diversifying our service offerings to address the broader talent management needs that face many organizations today. We did finish fiscal 2012 with a near-record consolidated fee revenue of $790.5 million, and that's just $100,000 shy of our all-time high. On a constant currency basis, our consolidated fiscal 2012 fee revenue grew $28 million or nearly 4%, with growth coming from all of our operating segments. Our growth in 2012 continue to outpace many of our industry competitors. In the fourth quarter, on a constant currency basis, fee revenue grew $10.2 million or 5.8% sequentially and was up $2 million or 1% compared to the fourth quarter of fiscal 2011. Now looking at new business trends, they also improved in our fiscal fourth quarter, with the number of newly opened combined executive search and leadership talent consulting assignments growing 6.5% compared to our fiscal third quarter. However, as Gary says, looking out the windshield, the pace of new business awards has been choppy, with sequential growth in the months of January through March followed by decline and flattening in the months of April and May. And I'll provide more insights on this as we discuss our fiscal 2013 first quarter outlook later on the call. Now despite the improved revenues, our operating earnings trends for the full year and in the fourth quarter were adversely affected by a number of items. With…

Thanks, Bob. Starting with our Executive Recruitment segment, driven by relatively stable demand from our core executive recruiting services and steadily increasing demand from our leadership and talent consulting offerings, consolidated fee revenue in the fourth quarter for our Executive Recruitment segment was $168.8 million, up $8.7 million or 5.4% sequentially, and down $3.2 million or 2% year-over-year. Growth in the fourth quarter was broad based, with all of our operating regions up except Europe, which, in a tough economic environment, was essentially flat. On a constant currency basis, our Executive Recruiting segment fee revenue in the fourth quarter was up $7.6 million or 5% sequentially, and down only $2.2 million or 1% year-over-year. Sequentially, growth was achieved in every major specialty market, including financial services and technology, which were up 16% and 14%, respectively from third quarter lows. For all of fiscal 2012, Executive Recruitment fee revenue grew $9.1 million or 1% on a constant currency basis, with slower growth in core executive search, offset by stronger growth in leadership and talent consulting services. In the North American region, fourth quarter fee revenue was $95.5 million and improved approximately $5.5 million or 6% sequentially and was off only $1.4 million or 1% year-over-year. Sequential growth was broad based with all specialty markets up, with the exception of consumer goods, which was essentially flat. Sequential growth was strongest in the life sciences health care practice, up 24%; the technology practice, up 14%; and the industrial practice, up 4%, The financial services practice in North America was up 34% sequentially from trough levels in the third quarter. For the full year, executive search and leadership and talent consulting revenue in North America was up 1.5% in fiscal 2012. Newly confirmed assignments in North America were up 9% sequentially in the fourth…

Thanks, Gregg. As we look forward, the worldwide market conditions obviously remain extremely volatile and uncertain. In fact, based on recent movements that we're seeing in the equity markets, it appears that confidence in any sort of meaningful near-term economic recovery is very mixed today. And as usual, monthly new business awards were seasonally strong in our fourth quarter, as I previously indicated, peaking in the month of March. However, executive search new business was down in April, relative to what we saw on March. And May new business was essentially flat with April. Assuming relatively stable economic conditions for the remainder of the quarter and assuming that June and July new business confirmations are in line with what we saw in May, we expect fiscal '13 first quarter fee revenue to likely range from $172 million to $188 million. And earnings per share will likely range from $0.14 to $0.22. This guidance also assumes foreign exchange rates remain at or near current spot rates and that financial markets remain relatively stable in today's terms. And finally, consistent with our historical practices, we're continuously evaluating our cost base in relation to projected near to midterm demand, to ensure that our cost structure aligns with the current realities of our markets. If actual and projected fee revenue continue at current levels, we may find it necessary to take more aggressive cost reduction actions to better align our cost structure with anticipated demand, appropriately sizing the firm to maintain strong operating profitability. With that, I'll conclude our prepared remarks for the day, and we would be glad to answer any questions that you may have.

[Operator Instructions] And we're going to go to the line of Tim McHugh with William Blair.

Yes, this is Stephen Sheldon in for Tim McHugh today. Could you provide a little more detail on what you're seeing in the financial services sector broadly? And then maybe talk specifically about the sequential growth you saw in the sector in North America?

Yes. The -- well, the financial services sector is very challenged with a lot of regulatory uncertainty. I would assume that the -- what we saw in the fourth quarter, we saw a sequential increase in financial services in both Asia and North America. And I wouldn't expect that to continue. Our view is that, that market's going to continue to be challenged.

And then your cash balance has grown considerably. Could you provide any detail on what you may be planning to do with that cash?

Well, we -- our first priority is to invest it in the business. And we overall, we see a $15 billion market opportunity, we want to have 10% of it. And so first and foremost is to continue to look for ways to elevate and extend this brand and create a differentiated platform. So that's first and foremost, and that's where we've got to demonstrate a track record of doing, and that's what we're going to continue to do.

We're going to try Tobey Sommer's line from SunTrust again.

Could you describe the sequential change in confirmations as you got into April and May? Because I know -- I think I recall that historically, April can see a little bit of a sequential fall off even in a normal market, let alone an uncertain one. So any additional color you could provide would be useful.

Yes. Well, I would say that -- first of all, March was significantly higher than the past months before that. And so when I look at April and May, I would say that they're down about 10% from the prior, call it, 5, 6 months trailing average. That's kind of the way I would look at it. I think March was unusually strong.

And then when you look at the business at the C-suites or board level, historically, has there been any either industries or levels within executive search that have been canaries in the coal mine for significant changes in demand, either on the upswing or the downswing?

Yes. Usually financial services, in what -- my professional career and then including in this business, financial services has generally been the first one in a recession and the first one out. And we did see that in the great recession for sure. This has been substantially different over the last several months. It's an invisible recovery here. So we haven't seen that life sciences, and health care has continued to be strong for us, as well as industrial. But the canary in the coal mine historically, Tobey, has been financial services.

And we'll now go to the line of Mark Marcon with R.W. Baird.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the European margins during the quarter in terms of what happened sequentially.

Yes, I think there's -- Mark, this is Bob Rozek. I think there's a couple of things with respect to the margins in the European business. One would relate to the incentive compensation and, as we looked across the profitability of that business during the course of the year, we're sort of what I would call true up adjustments in the fourth quarter with respect to their incentive compensation. So that put a little bit of downward pressure on it. And the other thing that we're seeing in our European business is the -- what they call their import/export relationships, and Europe is actually becoming a bigger exporter of business activity across that platform. Historically, they were a bigger importer. And that has some downward pressure on the margins as well. That is an area that we're going to be focusing on as we look into FY '13 in terms of making sure that we rebalance that out properly to transfer pricing and so on. And we'll also look to work with Bernard in terms of what we can do to continue to bring those margins back to what we've seen in historical quarters in the 12%, 13% range.

Can you explain that import/export dynamic a little bit more?

Yes, when we -- when transactions are initiated, the initiator gets a certain percentage of the revenue and then the executor gets the remaining percentage revenue. That's usually like an 80-20 split. In terms of the way individuals are compensated, it's not aligned to the 80-20, it's more of a 50-50. So if you're an exporter under our current pricing methodology and allocations protocol that we have in place, there's a drag on your margin as a result of that.

I'd say, Mark, that you look at it and -- I look at the yearly performance of Europe, and I think it was, Gregg, it's up 3%. Personally, I would add a 0 to that. I mean, I think that's an incredible achievement, given what's going on. But what Bob's talking about, I think, just reflects the fight for Western economies for growth. And for example, in this case, European companies are looking for growth outside the traditional borders.

And then -- that certainly makes sense. And then as we look out towards this coming quarter, you gave the commentary with regards to what you're seeing in terms of the confirm trends in April and May, where are you seeing the sharpest decelerations? You mentioned 10% down in terms of April relative to May or relative to March. Where -- is that across the board or...

I think again, the March is not a good one, so let's -- I would pull that out. And I think that the lift we got out in financial services, I would like to say it's sustainable, but I wouldn't bet on that. So when we look at it more broadly, it's fairly balanced. I mean, there's not a discernible trend that you can glean into these numbers.

How about from a geographic perspective? Is it similar? Or are you seeing any of the pronounced weakness in Europe starting to have any impact?

Again, I think it's been fairly broad, Mark. And certainly, this month is way too soon to call, but we're slightly ahead of where we were this time last month for whatever that's worth.

So you're just trying to be conservative in terms of the guidance that you're providing, based on what's understandable in terms of everything that we're reading and seeing?

Well, I don't know if it's -- again, I don't want to use conservative or liberal. I would only say that for just about any business, there's going to be a challenging few quarters here. And I think there's going to be a real fight for growth and relevancy, and I think the first job of a leader is to define reality. And I think it's very challenged.

Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing with regards to your competitors? And any sort of coaching activity and how it's looking from your perspective in terms of recruiting people to Korn/Ferry?

No. I mean, I haven't seen any noticeable change. We continue to invest into the brand. And whether that's intellectual property or solutions or people, we're going to continue to do that, but we're going to also strike the balance between investment and profitability.

And then can you also discuss what you're seeing in terms of client chatter related to LinkedIn and other potential technologies and how they're viewing that and how it impacts the value equation?

Well, I think the good news is that the world is flat, and that's the bad news. And that there is an overwhelming amount of data candidates. Everything is accessible certainly more readily. Now the question is, now what do you do with that? So on the one hand, it makes the world much easier and particularly at the lower levels. I mean, there's no question, where culture fits isn't as big of a piece. I think that, that has and will continue to have a pretty big impact on that segment of the market. But with the outliers of achievement, just take our average fee without the leadership business of 110,000, you're talking about the outliers of achievement there. Culture fit, leadership style, thinking style are extremely important, more so than even technical competency. And that's why we're anchoring the business in intellectual property, because we think the future is not finding people but really finding out who somebody is.

And then I certainly appreciate the continued emphasis in terms of trying to grow the business, but how are you thinking about the cash relative to the current equity value of the organization?

Well, that's not for us to comment on. I can only say, Mark, that when I came in this company 10 years ago, we had less than $30 million of cash. And those days are still very fresh in my mind. The days of -- 3.5 years ago where seemingly the world fell apart is also very fresh in my mind. So I think we're probably not that much different than corporate America, which is sitting on a lot of cash. And we're very cognizant of that, and we're also cognizant. We can't have the cash earning 20 bps. That's not necessarily the right thing to do in the long term. So we're just trying to strike that kind of balance. But as I indicated earlier, our first objective would be to try to use it in the business.

How much is how much are the bonus payouts going to be?

We ended the year with almost 420 of cash, let's just call. I'm rounding now, Mark. Let's just call it 120. So that gets you kind of $300 million of cash. As Bob and Gregg said, there's some monies locked up for deferred comp, right, to the tune of, I don't know, 70. So something like that.

We have roughly around 220 to 230 that's available.

That's right.

Yes, without any -- we've obviously got credit lines available to us and all that, but yes, yes, yes.

We'll next go to the line of Jennifer Huang with UBS.

Can you maybe talk about South America? I noticed that, that was very strong, driven -- as you mentioned in the prepared remarks by Brazil. Could that be -- is that sustainable into next year, do you think? Because -- revenues as well as, I guess, the operating margin. Because that could be potentially almost as big as Asia, if it's sustainable next year.

Well, it's certainly a fascinating place, but we've got to recognize that Latin America, if we include Mexico, we don't include these numbers in there, but it's still -- it's a smaller part of the portfolio today. And we don't project out more than a quarter. And clearly, what we saw in the fourth quarter, it was -- just take Brazil, it was the best quarter we've seen there for probably 7 quarters or so, something like that. So we've got a great team. We're continuing to invest in that team, but I can't make any comments really beyond the next quarter.

But nothing this quarter that you would think was a few particularly large -- large transactions or anything like that?

Again, I'm not expecting the next quarter's performance to be necessarily as good, given what I've talked about earlier. But that's probably as far as I'd go.

And then on the LTC business, it seems like that was very strong. And I was just wondering, just in general, as we're seeing companies face uncertainty in this environment, right, are they pulling back on HR-related spending or assessment spending? Or just in general, do companies tend to keep that, I guess, stable? Because as you mentioned before, they're trying to do more with less people or less personnel, and that's an area where they must spend. I mean, what's -- maybe you can talk about the dynamics there in terms of how companies think about it.

Well, we hope that that's the case. Overall, I would only -- the fundamental basis for the strategy is to differentiate the brand, to make the brand synonymous with talent management, to be able to go to a CEO, a board and say we can not only help you find great people, we can help you engage those people, align them to the strategy, develop them, retain them. I mean, that's absolutely what we're trying to do, to differentiate the organization and the brand. And when I look at both the Futurestep and the leadership businesses, if I look back in the great recession, those businesses were essentially half as cyclical, generally speaking, as the executive search business. When we look at it so far here, when we look at this quarter, what would happen year-over-year and sequentially, it certainly gives me a lot of enthusiasm when we see not only our search brand move up and the average fee at $108,000, $110,000, something like that, without the leadership offering. But not only when I look at that, but when I see the leadership business and the Futurestep business growing at the rates they are that -- I think that's a pretty good validation of the strategy. But look, make no mistake, we're a consulting business, that is what this firm is, and there's a piece of the spend that's discretionary. And we have to be very, very cognizant of that. But we think in those businesses, that we have multi-hundred million dollar opportunities.

We'll now go to the line of Ty Govatos with CL King.

A small question, bonus accrual for the fourth quarter?

The bonus accrual in the fourth quarter was approximately $32 million, $33 million.

And can you go in at all and discuss the increase in legal and professional fees you mentioned?

No, we normally don't get into that level of detail on these calls.

We'll go to the line of Kevin McVeigh from Macquarie.

This is actually Derek Sbrogna in for Kevin McVeigh. I was wondering if you guys could just detail how much you spent on professional services in the quarter? And then as a follow-up to that, if there's any thought to using some of that for buybacks?

Well, again, when it comes to our capital strategy, we're -- again, our first priority is to invest that in the business. And as a board, we have an ongoing dialogue and regular review of the different investment opportunities we have and alternatives. And to this point, I think we've got a very good track record of taking that capital and investing it in the business.

Our final question today will come from the line of Giri Krishnan with Credit Suisse.

I guess, a question around your comments about big licensing deals for IP to Fortune 500 firms. Is that something you're seeing also internationally? And when you talk about large deals, what -- is there any dollar terms you can assign to what today constitutes a larger deal?

Several hundred thousand dollars. That to me is a larger deal. And several years ago, we made an initial investment into intellectual property and tools, products that enable a CEO to align their people's strategy to what they're trying to achieve strategically. And these tools were very bullish on, long term and what this could mean for the organization. So in these 2 particular cases, Fortune 500 companies that are using our intellectual property to develop their workforce.

And the question around international, are you seeing similar demand for such deals internationally too?

Well, these were global companies, and they were in multiple languages. And I want to say -- I think it was both of them that are in multiple languages, but one of them is, for sure, with a very, very prominent company.

And last question, just a clarification on your revenue guidance. Are you assuming, in both South America and Asia Pac, sequential revenue declines?

Look, we're -- I mean, overall, we're -- the guidance assumes that things stay like they did in terms of new business awards in May. And if it goes south from there, revenue is going to be lower. If it goes higher, revenue will be slightly higher.

So it's an across the board sort of trend?

I mean, again, I wouldn't -- I'm not going to try to parse it that finely. But broadly speaking, that's how it's based.

All right, Mr. Burnison, I now turn it back over to you for any closing remarks.

Well, listen, I want to thank everybody for listening to this call. And again, I would look back over this past year and think of the word pride for our -- what we've done for our clients, helping them achieve extraordinary results through their people. I'm also proud of our organization in this kind of economic environment. And at the same time, I'm energized and excited as I look out the windshield because with this kind of environment, it creates opportunity. And I think we're very well positioned on a number of different dimensions to seize that opportunity. So with that, I'd say good evening and thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this conference call will be available for replay for one week starting today at 7:00 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time and running through the day, June 20 at midnight. You may access the AT&T executive playback service by dialing 1 (800) 475-6701 and entering the access code 250110. International participants may dial 1 (320) 365-3844. Additionally, the replay will be available for playback at the company's website, www.kornferry.com in the Investor Relations section. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation and for using AT&T's executive teleconference. You may now disconnect. Speakers may remain on the line.