We believe Vedior has the right infrastructure, strategy, products and services to identify and recruit the best people on behalf of our clients. Our databases are rich with talented people who have been personally interviewed, referenced and assessed by our consultants. This means we can respond swiftly to our client’s recruitment needs - town by town, region by region, country by country or on a global level. As the ‘war for talent’ intensifies, our services become increasingly valuable to our clients.

We focus on our core competence of recruitment and take advantage of the positive demographic, business and social trends which are driving the growth of our industry. We aim to offer a full range of specialist recruitment services to both local and multinational employers in markets worldwide. Our strategy is to develop strong local brands dedicated to specific employment sectors in order to concentrate our expertise and attract the best candidates. As skill shortages become more acute, demand for our services increases. Our global network provides an ideal platform to develop our business and expand the range of recruitment services that we offer in each country. Our decentralised business model empowers local management with the flexibility and creativity to adopt market specific strategies and maximise growth opportunities.

Growth opportunities for our Company are further enhanced by the ongoing liberalisation of labour laws in several countries. We play an active role in trade federations at both a local and international level. In particular, we sponsor CIETT, our Industry’s international trade federation, to lobby governments and demonstrate the benefits of adopting more flexible working practices. We also sponsor independent research into trends in labour markets.

We are able to build our business through a well-balanced mixture of organic and acquisitive growth. We value organic growth highly and have extensive experience of launching services into new markets. We also have a proactive acquisition programme, where our focus is mostly within high-growth specialist sectors. We target smaller, fast-growing companies where the founding management team wishes to stay in place and accelerate the development of their business with our help. Our business development priorities are to build on our leading position in professional and executive recruitment, expand our presence in faster growing markets in Central Europe, the Americas and Asia and reduce our growth dependence on more mature markets and sectors.

We will continue to deploy new technologies to enhance our productivity and keep abreast of the latest industry developments. We will also continue to encourage sharing of best practices across the Group to enhance the quality of our services and reduce operating costs. In 2007 we are introducing a global leadership development programme for senior managers to foster our own talent, coordinate skill development and improve internal communication.

Financial Targets

We have set geographic operating margin targets. The achievement of these targets, which in part depends on economic trends, would result in an overall Group operating margin (after corporate expenses) in the range of 4.6% to 5.6%.

We believe that, for a recruitment company, a degree of financial leverage is both appropriate and prudent. We use debt to finance working capital and maintain our net debt within the range of 25% to 50% of accounts receivable. The level of borrowing we need depends on our working capital requirement, which in turn depends on the level of sales. Our industry is cyclical, but cash flows are less volatile than earnings because of compensating fluctuations in working capital. At the end of 2006, net debt was €558 million or 35% of accounts receivable – well within our target range.

We intend to maintain interest cover higher than 6 (EBITDA: net interest) and leverage lower than 2.5 (net debt: EBITDA). At 31 December 2006, the interest cover ratio was 10.4 and the leverage ratio was 1.7.

Vedior has credit facilities of over €1 billion, which meets our current requirements. Included within this amount are committed syndicated credit facilities of €650 million which mature in 2011 and €150 million with an initial maturity at the end of 2007 which can be extended to 2009. These facilities are at floating interest rates linked to Euribor and Libor.

In 2006, Vedior also completed a private debt placement of USD 215 million (€170 million) with US institutional investors. The debt is comprised of senior notes split into two equal amounts with 7 and 10 year maturity dates. The Company has swapped USD 65 million of the sum raised into Euro, and USD 75 million into pounds sterling. The Euro denominated debt is at floating interest rates while the US dollar and the pound sterling denominated debt is at fixed initerest rates. Through this private placement, Vedior has been able to extend the maturity and diversity of its sources of debt finance.