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ceo statement |
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“I am delighted to announce that we won European Industrial Developer of the Year in October 2007, which reflects our growing presence in Europe.” |
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Ian Coull Chief Executive |
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2007 has been a year of significant growth and change at SEGRO, with adjusted profit before tax up 7.7 per cent to £153.7 million, principally due to the expansion of our activities in Europe. |
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Summary of Progress Against 2007 Targets
Of the 36 target set by SEGRO in 2007, the following progress was made: |
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Targets fully completed |
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Substantial progress made (targets over half way completed)
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Some progress made (targets up to half way completed) |
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No progress made |
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Insufficient evidence to audit targets |
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Change of circumstances – targets no longer relevant |
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2007 was a continuation of our transformation programme which we started five years ago. In the past year we became a UK REIT and a SIIC in France, achieved critical mass in Continental Europe, delivered a timely and well-executed disposal of our US business, and sold our interest in Slough Heat & Power station to the Scottish and Southern Energy network1. In light of all this activity we also took the opportunity to refresh our corporate identity and changed our name to SEGRO. We are now a tighter, more focused business, both in what we do and where we work. This consolidation of our business, focusing our energies on what we do best, has produced excellent profits (our adjusted profit before tax increased by 7.7 per cent to £153.7 million). Looking forward, we expect the continuing weakness in the credit and real estate investment markets to maintain downward pressure on UK commercial property values during the first half of 2008. However, occupier demand across all our key markets continues to hold up well.
This current economic climate has made it all the more important to stand out from a crowded marketplace and provide customers with added value and investors with lower risks. At SEGRO, we actively manage our environmental, economic and social responsibilities which continue to be key strategic priorities for the Company. These responsibilities are becoming more and more integrated into our work, influencing our day to day decisions as well as impacting positively on our wider stakeholders. Furthermore, we are focusing our efforts on those issues that are most important to our business.
This document, our fifth consecutive annual Corporate Responsibility Report, provides an overview of what we achieved in 2007, the challenges we faced and outlines what we will be doing in 2008 and beyond to further embed Corporate Responsibility into the way SEGRO operates. With the changes mentioned, we aim to be even more focused and ambitious in trying to manage our environmental, economic and social responsibilities through practical actions as demonstrated throughout this Report.
In 2007, we set ourselves 36 targets to focus our Corporate Responsibility activities. Full details of our progress against these targets can be found throughout this Corporate Responsibility Report and on our website (www.SEGRO.com).
As ever, in all periods of transition, new challenges arise. One challenge that we face revolves around the roll out of our Corporate Responsibility standards and management systems across the European business. We have made some good progress in standardising policies and procedures to date, especially in the area of Human Resources. However, we still have lots of work to do to ensure universal practices across all countries. We acknowledge that this is just the start of a process that will take time to evolve, and we are keen to ensure that best practices from across all parts of the business are embedded throughout.
Data collation and management is emerging as another key challenge, both from the perspective of the European challenge outlined above, but also in terms of the rising disclosure expectations of our stakeholders. Increasingly, we are reliant on third parties such as suppliers to provide us with the necessary information to report on our performance. In the future we will need to work even more closely with our suppliers to ensure that data is readily available – partnership therefore remains a key priority in becoming a more sustainable and responsive business. |
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Ian Coull
Chief Executive
April 2008 |
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| 1 |
Like Slough Heat & Power, Scottish and Southern Energy is fully committed to increasing levels of renewable energy generation and is a major investor in and developer of renewable energy technology. Scottish and Southern Energy is one of the largest energy companies in the UK. This gives our customers access to deeper and wider utility expertise. |
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BREEAM (BRE Environmental Assessment Method) is a widely used methodology to assess the sustainability performance of various building types against predefined criteria. |
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The areas in which we have made most progress over the past year include: |
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Employees |
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We strengthened our Human Resources functionin Paris, enabling Group-wide adoption of Human Resource practices including remuneration. |
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We rolled out the “Personal Development Review” for our employees across all of our European operations. This will help us going forward in our ambition to become a truly European business. |
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We communicated the results from the employee engagement survey. This was the first time we had surveyed employees both in the UK and Continental Europe. The results were very encouraging and throughout the year we followed up on a number of suggested improvements. |
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| communities |
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We calculated that the work we do within our communities has a financial value of £630,000. We also increased the number of employees volunteering by 76 per cent. |
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We strengthened community relations in the Berkshire area by participating in Business in the Community’s “Seeing is Believing” programme. |
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customers |
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We improved our relationship with our customers through better communication and understanding of their ever changing business needs. This resulted in the highest ever customer satisfaction rating in our annual customer survey, with 77 per cent of those surveyed stating that they were ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with the service they received from SEGRO. |
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We improved our overall score and rank in the top quartile in the Real Service Best Practice Index. |
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We have arranged a series of Breakfast Briefings together with the Carbon Trust and will work with our customers on a series of carbon reduction measures. |
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| environment |
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We commissioned a carbon footprint study of the Slough Trading Estate. We hope that this will help us manage our carbon emissions on the Estate and ultimately reduce our footprint across our business. |
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All our UK developments are designed to achieve at least a ‘very good’ BREEAM2 rating. |
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We hosted a contractor workshop to engage with contractors on our approach to environmental management during construction. We hope that this will lead to stronger partnerships to minimise the environmental impacts of our development activities. |
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