Good morning, all, and a warm welcome to ABG Sundal Collier's fourth quarter results presentation. Before we kick off the presentation, I'd like to mention that we will, as usual, have a Q&A session after the presentation, and should you want to raise a question, please use the Q&A function in Teams, and we will answer all questions in turn. I'm also, as usual, joined by my CFO, Geir Olsen. Let me start with sharing some reflection about the fourth quarter and 2023 as a whole. I think it's fair to say that our markets have been challenging throughout the year, with indications from global peers that already have reported that investment banking revenues are down by 10%-20% or even 30% in some markets.
Looking at our home markets, it's clear that the Nordic market, in general, has done better, driven by clearly higher activity in Norway, where the market, in fact, has been not only more active, but actually up in absolute terms. The Swedish market has been more of a reflection of the global development, i.e., very weak. And combining these two markets, it's our best judgment that they are down in absolute numbers. From that perspective, I'm very pleased with our improved performance during the second half of the year. As we witnessed in Q3, we saw an increase in revenues of 18%, and momentum continued into Q4 with an increase in revenues of 7%. That means we ended up bang in line with 2022 on top line.
Once again, this proves what I would say is the resilience of our diversified business model within what is a rather cyclical industry. Our commitment to this strategy, providing solutions to our clients rather than selling products to clients, such as IPOs, that obviously has been out of vogue in 2023, has been deeply integrated into our approach for, for many, many years. Providing solutions to our clients, be it creating liquidity in securities where there appears to be no liquidity or providing capital to companies in an IPO market that is basically shut, requires us to constantly invest in having top positions in all relevant product areas. Not in one, not in two, but in all of them, and also be in the forefront of the business and product development.
So with that, let's look more at the numbers and dig a bit into what happened during the quarter and full year. As mentioned, revenues of NOK 545 million brought us to in line with or actually NOK 3 million above the 2022 mark. I just talked about our diversified business model, and that is further illustrated by the very even distribution of revenues between M&A advisory, corporate finance, and brokerage research. I will revert to that later on. Margins negatively affected by not least the continued weakening of the NOK, cost inflation, and our new business initiatives that we expect to launch according to plan during the year. All these factors contributed to the operating margin decreasing from 23%-19%.
In spite of the full negative effect from all these factors hitting Q4 specifically, our EPS in the quarter were still up from 18-19 øre, resulting in EPS of at 44 øre for the full year. Let's continue with looking at the macro backdrop and the market backdrop. I'd say that for once, consensus early in Q4 actually proved to be right in expecting a strong finish to stock markets in Q4. The rally from end of October, early November, obviously was spurred by, by dovish statements from Fed and many indices rallied some 15% the last two months of the year as interest rates decline.
We also continued to witness a low and rather stable development of volatility expressed in the middle of this chart as the VIX index that were at or below 20. The important 20 mark. We usually say that below 20, the IPO market is open. That is not the case yet. It's positive signs. We've seen interest rates going down, markets reacting positively, and the VIX staying low. But we still yet have to see a broader conviction and increase in risk appetite before we see the IPO window really opening up again. We need a little bit of patience, but once we get there, I expect a lot of pent-up demand contributing to strong tailwinds for us in that segment again.
Meanwhile, we will continue to serve our clients and do transactions regardless of the conditions the market chooses to expose us to. So, let's look at the next slide and the market volumes and the development in our key product areas, starting off with capital markets and ECM. Headline slightly up by 7% quarter year-on-year. Beneath, below the headline, it's very clear that this slight increase is more than 100% driven by rights issues. Whereas private placements, where independent investment banks, such as ABG, usually are competing on equal terms with the lending banks, is a product that is down in the quarter.
Looking at DCM, the volumes are up to a large degree, driven by Norwegian activity, not least within oil-related sectors, also with high participation from lending banks. M&A market, I have during the last couple of quarters talked about our own expectations that we will see increased activity and a recovery in M&A activity as sellers and buyers are getting closer to each other again, and we can see that that recovery is now starting to happen. That said, there is some way to go before we are back at normalized levels when it comes to the M&A market in terms of structured processes. It's still a lot of bilateral processes that make out quite a lot of these volumes, and as such, visibility is a bit lower.
But once again, we see activity increasing, and we see it in our own pipeline as well. Continuing with the next slide and our performance in these markets, starting off with corporate finance, we continued to see momentum, the momentum we saw in Q3, with an increase in revenues in what was a rather tricky quarter. Revenues increased by NOK 20 million, from NOK 124 million to NOK 144 million, and increased by 12%. Sorry, ending up to NOK 580 million for the full year, which was an increase by 12%.
We've done extremely well within equity capital markets, our equity capital markets operation in Norway, where we increased our market shares to an impressive +25%, more than twice the market share number two participant in this market. And as you can see on the right-hand side of this slide, we have also been active within primary placements in Sweden, especially within real estate during Q4, a sector that has been, to say the least, out of vogue during 2023. And in the DCM segment, I'm pleased to see that we have been able to raise capital in various forms, such as the convertible bond issued by Hexagon, aside the more traditional high-yield bonds, for example, Avanza and Gaming Innovation Group.
Moving over to the next slide and looking at how we did within mergers and acquisitions, Q4, as previously mentioned, was a super strong quarter in terms of M&A, driven by a stellar performance from our Norwegian M&A team with landmark transactions such as, as yet again, advising Visma in expanding their shareholder base, the buyout of Kahoot!, a client we've been working with for many, many years, the sale of Self Storage Group and Telenor Satellite, to mention a few. The strong finish to an otherwise more muted M&A activity earlier this year resulted in us almost closing the gap versus the, for us, rather strong M&A year in 2022.
Looking at Q4 specifically, it was once again a stellar performance and close to record high Q4 M&A revenues for ABG. Continuing with the third and last pillar that our business rests upon. Next slide, please. Brokerage and Research operation that has continued to deliver an extremely stable and solid performance. Overall, being flat with revenues at NOK 565 million during the year and NOK 143 million during the quarter. Slightly down quarter-over-year after facing rather strong comps in 2022. Looking into what has been the biggest contributors in this business area, I would like to highlight the very strong performance from our Norwegian equity sales desk, as well as our international sales desk performance.
Fixed income sales has also established a run rate of secondary revenues at a significantly higher level than previous years. The large institutional client base in Sweden has, on the other hand, been less active during 2023, but we have kept ground against the competition. We're also delighted that our clients appreciate our commitment, as evident by the recent Prospera survey rankings, in which we were number one in research and advisory in Norway, and overall number two in Sweden. Super strong achievement, and also, I would like to mention that the Norwegian financial journal Kapital also recognized our efforts, awarding our analyst and broker team with 12 podium places, including the number one analyst and number one broker.
Okay, so, with that, I'd like to leave the word over to Geir, who'll talk a bit about costs and development of FTEs.
Thank you, Jonas. When looking at our costs, there is really nothing special to report in Q4 specific. I would say the story is really very similar to what we have seen in recent quarters. It's FX and inflation. Being a company reporting in Norwegian kroner, I would say exchange rates continues to be a topic as our currency remains weak. We are down 5% year-on-year relative to Swedish kroner, and 10%-13% relative to other relevant currencies in which we have a significant cost base. This then inflates our costs with about NOK 50 million for the full year.
The general fight against price increases and underlying inflation, as we all know, is continuous, and we will continue to challenge our suppliers and review our spending on a regular basis to try to reduce this. Another key cost driver we can impact is headcount. As you can see, the average headcount for the full year is up 3% or by nine people on an average term relative to 2022. However, at the year-end, we were down from 340 to 330. This latter number includes also a number of staff recruited to our new business areas, so that the number of people in our, I'll say, current operations are down even more than that.
And the reduction is a consequence of us having trimmed our organization through a combination of natural churn and active performance management throughout the year. So to summarize the cost base relative to 2022, fixed costs are up about NOK 50 million due to FX. This is, of course, hard to impact in the short term. But also, as Jonas mentioned initially, it's also a consequence of growth by design as our new business initiatives, who are yet to start generating revenues, recorded costs of about NOK 25 million. We expect this to be somewhat higher in 2024, but longer term, this will be very controlled growth and as a function of revenue development.
So, adjusting for all these effects, the underlying costs for our current operations would have been slightly down, and we do not expect any, material change to this, going forward. So with that, Jonas, back to you and, dividends.
Thank you. Thank you, Geir. Let's flip slide. Thank you. A few words about distribution to shareholders and capitalization. We, the Board has proposed a cash dividend of NOK 0.50 per share, and that is basically reflecting our commitment to distribute excess capital while keeping a prudent capitalization ratio by keeping our buffer versus the regulatory requirements intact. But it's also expressing confidence in our ability to execute transactions and deliver results on our strong platform. So, with that, I'd like to, if we could flip to the next and final slide, please, summarize what I believe are the key takeaways. We finished the year on a high with the momentum we experienced in our own performance during Q3, continuing in Q4.
We are focused on serving our clients' needs rather than selling products, meaning we have the ability to advise and execute on different transactions that might have been originally planned and other transactions that other peers would have probably had a harder time executing. In order to enable us to do just that, serve our clients regardless of market conditions, we need to be strong within all relevant product areas, and 2023 demonstrated just that. Revenues were evenly spread, basically with a third each from corporate financing, M&A, and brokerage research. We are convinced we will be able to continue to execute on a pipeline that is in better shape to be executed upon, given the market circumstances, compared to the state of the pipeline the same time last year.
Should we, on top of that, experience tailwinds from more convictions about future direction in the market, we are, of course, very well positioned to benefit from that. So, with that, I'd like to open up the floor for any questions.
Unfortunately, it seems like we're having a bit of a problem with the Q&A function today. So I'd like to encourage all of you with questions to email those to us, and we will directly reply on those emails instead. I have, however, received two questions via email already. The first being: What are the main drivers behind the uptick in performance in the second half of the year?
In the second half of the year, we have in Q4, let me start with Q4 specifically. It's very clear that we witnessed stellar performance from our Norwegian operations, not least within M&A. In Q3, it was actually a mix of contribution from all geographies, not least within corporate finance. So I think, in sum, H2 is a testimony of what we can achieve if we are strong in many geographies and in many product areas.
What is the status on the new business areas? Are all operations proceeding as planned?
Yeah, let me start with, Private Banking is according to plan in terms of an expected launch later this year, i.e., onboarding new clients. It's obviously a huge task starting a private bank, a greenfield, so to speak, but we are on track to meet our own expectations in terms of timing. The other main area in terms of new business initiatives would be alternative investments, where we are actively in the phase of raising capital, and that is progressing as well according to plan, so we expect that to be closed during the year 2024.
If anyone would have any other questions, please send us an email, and we will reply to those emails.
Okay. Sorry for the technical difficulties here, but as Anna instructed, please do not hesitate to contact us, either via email or reach out directly to Anna on the phone. Thank you all for tuning in, and looking forward to what 2024 might bring in terms of revenues and profits. Thank you so much.