Company: LAZ
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001628280-25-007441
Chunk: 91

Company: Lazard, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 91
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Item 1.    Business

Founded in 1848, Lazard is one of the world's preeminent financial advisory and asset management firms, with operations in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. Lazard provides advice on mergers and acquisitions, capital markets and capital solutions, restructuring and liability management, geopolitics, and other strategic matters, as well as asset management and investment solutions to institutions, corporations, governments, partnerships, family offices, and high net worth individuals.

Principal Business Lines

We focus primarily on two business segments: Financial Advisory and Asset Management. We believe that the mix of our activities across business segments, geographic regions, industries and investment strategies helps to diversify and stabilize our revenue stream.

Financial Advisory 

We advise leaders on their most important financial and strategic matters, serving as a trusted advisor whose  mission is to ensure the best result for our clients. Our Financial Advisory business offers corporate, partnership, institutional, government, sovereign and individual clients across the globe a wide array of advisory services including mergers and acquisitions (“M&A”) advisory, capital markets advisory, shareholder advisory, sovereign advisory, geopolitical advisory, restructuring and liability management, capital raising and placement, and other strategic matters. 

We continue to build our Financial Advisory business by fostering long-term relationships with existing and new clients as their independent advisor on strategic transactions and other matters. We seek to build and sustain long-term relationships with our clients rather than focusing simply on individual transactions, a practice that we believe enhances our access to senior management of major corporations and institutions around the world. We emphasize providing clients with senior-level focus during all phases of transaction analysis and execution.

While we strive to earn repeat business from our clients, we operate in a highly competitive environment in which there are no long-term contracted sources of revenue. Each revenue-generating engagement is separately negotiated and awarded. To develop new client relationships, and to develop new engagements from historical client relationships, we maintain an active dialogue with a large number of clients and potential clients, as well as with their financial and legal advisors, on an ongoing basis. We have gained a significant number of new clients through our business development initiatives. In addition, developing internal talent and the lateral recruiting of senior investment banking professionals are also core components of our growth strategy. At the same time, we lose clients each year as a result of the sale, merger or restructuring of a client, a change in a client’s senior management, competition from other investment banks and other causes.

We earned $1 million or