We aim to work in long-term partnerships and strive to ensure that the standard of our service is consistently high for both short- and long term customers and throughout the length of any contract.  We maintain a regular dialogue with our customers in order to understand and plan for the ongoing requirements of their businesses and to keep them informed of developments within our business.  It is our policy to ensure that any service-delivery issue is resolved promptly. Often our customers require facilities on a long-term basis to secure their operations and, as a result, we are able to achieve long-term commitments from them, which enable us to make major investments in developing our ports’ facilities.  We conduct our customer relationships in an open and equitable way and have clearly communicated our target internal rate of return on investment of 15 per cent to all stakeholders.  This approach benefits our customers by giving them the security of knowing that the facilities they need to run their businesses are available to them and benefits our financial stakeholders by allowing us to grow our business in a relatively low risk way and providing visibility of future revenues.

In 2006, we intend to complete a review of our existing customer management practices with a view to the implementation of appropriate future key performance indicators.