Group Chief Executive’s Review of 20062006 was an important year in the strategic development of thegroup. We completed two new major riverside terminals built on the back of customer demand at Immingham, completed our exitfrom non-core activities in the USA and successfully transitioned from being a public company to ownership by the Admiral consortium of private investors. In addition, all of the group’s activities produced a strong operating performance and we made good progress with our CSR targets and initiatives. It is pleasing to report that our performance on health and safety improved across the board, with our key performance indicator of reportable injuries improving to a record low of 5.3 per thousand employees. On the subject of employees, a continued focus on absence-management practices enabled us to further improve our performance in this area. We also launched a 10-month leadership skills programme for managers and senior managers during the year, as part of our ongoing commitment to develop our people. Recognising the need to further improve the monitoring of our customer-relationship management, we are introducing two new targets aimed at measuring the effectiveness of our practices in this area. We are setting targets for our management in relation to their ‘call’ and ‘care’ visits with customers andintroducing a formal feedback mechanism for the more significant customer-related investment schemes that we undertake. These initiatives should also allow us to improve our reporting on this topic. The group made good progress on its community-relations targets and we provided further training to employees on this subject. We exceeded our key environmental targets on resource consumption, although along with most other businesses, the development of a robust waste-reporting process remains a priority. Following its acquisition by the Admiral consortium, the group reviewed its existing reporting practices and concluded that it would not continue with external verification of its CSR reports. This activity was felt to be unnecessary as it overlaps with internal independent verification of the group’s CSR activities. Consequently, the group does not expect this change to impact the quality or integrity of its future reporting. The group continues to believe that the effective management of its social responsibilities is integral to the attainment of its long-term business objectives. Therefore, we do not expect the change in ownership to affect the emphasis we place on managing our wider responsibilities. Having made good progress over the past few years, I will now be stepping down as Group Chief Executive on 31 March 2007. However I am confident that my successor, Peter Jones, will continue to develop our CSR practices during the coming years. As always, your comments are an important ingredient in the successful development of our future practices. You can give us your opinions on our journey to date and our future plans by using the feedback form located at http://csr.abports.co.uk/contact/feedback.htm. Thank you for yourcontinued support. 30 March 2007 |
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 BO LERENIUS, CBE |
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